Reddit
LD48 Voting system improvements
December 14th, 2011 5:44 pmAs the Compo seems to be getting increasingly more attention and entries, the voting process is getting longer and more difficult to manage.
How are you supposed to vote, or which game are you supposed to vote? Usually, with this amount of games you’d look for screenshots or names that catch your attention. But not everyone has decent graphics or is creative when giving his baby a name, that doesn’t make their games any less play-worthy.
We were briefly discussing this on irc, and i came up with the idea of batch-voting for the entries, in a similar fashion as the theme votes are being made. Every hour a list gets accumulated by games that 1. have not been voted for by you yet, 2. a good amount of games which didn’t receive that much attention 3. a number of games taken randomly from the remaining.
you will only be able to vote games from within that batch(this is only true for the voting list you can request, so you still can vote others when following direct links to the submission page), and to get the next batch you’ll have to wait for the refresh.
This will also ensure that people will be able to spend more than a minute playing your game, before throw it out of the window just to quickly get their hands on the next, because they have to wait anyways, they might just aswell spend it playing your game.
If you’re a diligent voter, you could *unlock* a view-all- entry list when voted 25% of the entries.
This is just a quick idea to get more fairness in the voting progress of such a huge submission pool.
- [x] Check checkbox
You guys have any other ideas or suggestions?
I really like this idea! It’s almost like walking into a new arcade every hour!
That’s a great idea! It’s sort of like the “Random Unrated Pixel Art” link on pixeljoint. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, visit pixeljoint.com.
Throwin’ in my signature for this, although this could take a bit more programming time than is available…
+1
love this idea!
+1 good idea. and gives me a chance if you guys use it this competition
Maybe we could also tag our games, so voters can search for stuff they like. For example we would put tags like “3d”, “puzzle”, “anime”, “crafting”, etc…
I’m not a huge fan of this. What if I ran out of games to vote in my batch? I tend to vote on a ton of games all at once.
You actually need to spend time playing the game, if you read correctly.
There’s a timer that will prevent you from voting for another game in the batch before it runs out, meaning a new list should become available just as you vote for the last game in your batch.
So essentially the current system, with a timer. Not too sure how I feel about this… I like the concept of more evenly distributed votes, but not the fact that people are forced to distribute them. It should be a choice.
Batch voting can’t guarantee that some games won’t get skipped over for the same reasons they are now.
Person thinks if they try three games from the current batch they will be satisfied that they’re doing their fair share. But they’ll then cherry pick three that sound interesting, look interesting, or are easiest to try because they’re web/flash games.
I think it would be a nightmare too. Imagine trying a game from the current batch, and then the timer runs out, leaving you stuck not being able to rate a game you were just asked to rate.
Last time, my suggestion of sorting games by least number of votes was added, and that seems to work well, because those with fewest votes keep begging to be played. It ensured that all games got at least 10 votes, and there’s no restriction on what can/can’t be rated.
That’s actually a pretty great idea. I’d agree with digital_sorceress, having a new list every hour would probably not work well (would still result in a lot of games being skipped over). Maybe have a list of suggested games in the manner that you stated, in addition to the traditional listing. Except you don’t get a completely new list every hour, but maybe every hour it removes the games you’ve already voted on from the list and repopulates it with new ones (but keeps the old ones you haven’t voted for yet).