for the past while I've had a feeling that the aura code isn't working totally properly. just about every active botbr that has voted in recent major battles (since perhaps early 2012) has either grey or skulls now, with only 1 or 2 exceptions.

I suspect there might be a rounding error, or possibly a broken if-then-else statement somewhere... mathematically, you should see more of an even distribution than this, since auras are based on comparisons to other people's votes (theoretically at least).

this isn't really 100% true though, because as far as I can tell botb only grants aura points to a botbr when he/she casts a vote. that means the first voter on a given entry will never have their aura change, even though many other people may vote after them. I've also noticed you can rack up additional aura points by re-saving your votes, which is slightly broken too...

it might be a neat upgrade to the aura system to have aura points be awarded upon the final battle tally - that'd be a more "completist" way of doing it, because it wouldn't matter what order the votes were cast in. I think it would also add to the fun of seeing a battle's results, to see how everyone's aura changed :)

this methodology could also facilitate having ohb voting affect auras, which I am 99% sure it currently does not.

I'm cool with being skully.

I had assumed the latter but only puke (and maybe strobe) knows for sure :)

level 15 completist

oh, I guess to amend the generalization I made, not everybody I'm talking about has skulls, but the lion's share of those that don't are "close" - dark red or dark blue (like EH2 and jrlepage).

the only reason i'm still orange btw is because i've been a lazy butt and not voted in a major since ~sunvox :P

These skulls are turning BotB into a big lovefest where everybody gets a high score. :)

Maybe it is not so bad after all!

i voted in a major for the first time today and now i am a cool skull guy also

Why should one care about having a "good aura" (whatever that is)? Is there a consequence for keeping a skull for too long? What is the significance of the aura anyway? What information does it communicate to me about a given botbr?

Anyway I always assumed I had a red aura because I tend to give fairly low scores compared to other voters. I also tend to vote really early in OHBs, so maybe I voted too low once and too early every time after that, thus my aura never changed? I dunno~

It communicates how cool I am.

I do miss the day when you were innocent and green. :3

yeah, my implication was never that skulls were "bad" - just that seeing so many botbrs get them lately has made me concerned that something code-wise behind the scenes has been malfunctioning...

I think I figured this out. I looked at the aura code and discovered that it's accounting for 5 voting categories unless the format is a sample. I changed it so that, if it's an OHB, it only checks for one voting category. What I think was happening was : aura changes are based on the difference between the vote and the average vote so the final algorithm for categories 2-5 were $vote(or NULL) - $avg_for_category(which should be FALSE or 0). It would take a negative value somewhere to make skulls, so I am still confused as passing 0 to the aura updater would mean everyone should have grey auras.

I also added a clause, that if there is no average then the average is set to 4.