Let's not forget: arrange entries in alphabetical order.

adder wrote:
Well, from steam chat:

SpaceTroll: well as we said for the competition we keep the right to adapt the faction with the author to be adaptable within constraints and vision,

SpaceTroll: so I prefer that people choose the one they want then we find a way to make it work as close as possible to the general idea.

This is exactly what I expected but I fear that a final result of a difficult to implement faction may still turn out to be entirely different then what people voted for. Or it may not but even the uncertainty of that is enough to make a lot of people vote differently just because they want to avoid voting for "risky" ideas.



I would be so much happier if the devs handpicked the 3 entries to put in G2G. Or at least picked 10 submissions they liked most and create a much more manageable poll that everyone would read (except the most biased/laziest of forum members). And even then, that polls should still have all the features that Nos mentioned before:

Nosferatiel wrote:
[LIST=1]

individually randomized order of entries per voter

anonymous submission

owning the game being prerequisite to voting

everyone being blinded to the result of the vote, until the result is final

[/LIST]

Also, a short summary with a word limit should be a must for every entry in any future competition. Let people write as much as they want but force them to provide the potential readers with a shortened version of their work.

Wredniak2003 wrote:
I think you are missing my point ^^" I focus more on relation between those changes and the votes if people new the feature they loved the most would be cut, changed ect... As of now you really don't know to which extent those factions are going to be implemented and imo that causes some confusion.

Well, from steam chat:

SpaceTroll: well as we said for the competition we keep the right to adapt the faction with the author to be adaptable within constraints and vision,

SpaceTroll: so I prefer that people choose the one they want then we find a way to make it work as close as possible to the general idea.

Korthulhu wrote:
Ettin and Haunt combined have 2,073,230 points, while Sister of Mercy has 1,900,050 points. The two monsters races apparently have more votes combined, but only barely (173,180 points.) I'm not sure if that says anything about vote splitting because there were two monster races versus a humanoid one, but it certainly doesn't support your assertion that "combined losing factions will probably have at least half more votes than the winning one." I also think it's kind of a petty blow to reduce choosing the Sister of Mercy to "pretty woman with breasts in armor." Anecdotal, but I know that's certainly not why my friend voted for the Sister. I'm not really getting your ire over this vote in particular or how this isn't producing a fair result, and I don't see where the case is to change the G2G voting system because of this one instance.

Earlier ettin and haunt used to combined outweigh sister of mercy by larger margin, but sister of mercy has recently gotten enough points to close the gap. And previous votes show that most of them go with "One that is very clearly losing, one that gets bit more support and one that is clearly winning", "One that is clearly losing and two that are directly competing with each other" or "All three are almost winning and one of them wins by few points". It is rarely "Two that are doing as badly, one that is clearly winning" but that is pretty rare as well.



So since the situation is "Two have almost as much votes, one has much more votes and those two outnumber the one" it does show that in case of this g2g the vote is split to extent. Besides, like most people in forum said, when they voted for auriga natives, they had monstrous races in mind. That means people who voted prisoners or guards are more likely to vote sisters unless they wanted some of other Endless Space races. So yes, vote is indeed leading. It may not be as visible anymore, but in past week it was obvious before sister of mercy gained more votes. Same way how cartographer and mage were directly competing until mage finally gained clear lead.

Wredniak2003 wrote:
Let's pick 3 factions like it was said from begging but if by the end of the voting none of them got 50% of votes why not allow shorter 2nd round between those 2 with most votes? You wouldn't even need to reset votes, just allow those from 3rd faction to be recast on one of those 2. (Similar to how presidential elections in my country work. If no candidate get's 50% there is 2nd round with only 2 best candidates to make sure the winner really got majority of votes).

I wish elections worked like that in the United States.

Korthulhu wrote:
Ettin and Haunt combined have 2,073,230 points, while Sister of Mercy has 1,900,050 points. The two monsters races apparently have more votes combined, but only barely (173,180 points.) I'm not sure if that says anything about vote splitting because there were two monster races versus a humanoid one, but it certainly doesn't support your assertion that "combined losing factions will probably have at least half more votes than the winning one." I also think it's kind of a petty blow to reduce choosing the Sister of Mercy to "pretty woman with breasts in armor." Anecdotal, but I know that's certainly not why my friend voted for the Sister. I'm not really getting your ire over this vote in particular or how this isn't producing a fair result, and I don't see where the case is to change the G2G voting system because of this one instance.

Then I'm clearly mistaken and I admit that. I based most of the post on the time when sisters had around 500k votes and both ettin and haunt around 400k so it was 8:5. I did not checked it recently as it always log me out of forums ^^". However; I still believe that both haunt and ettin are too similar or rather sister is too different compared to both of them to make it fair competition. That is my opinion and although I may not change how you view that it is how I feel about that. Maybe "fair" is not the right choice to use because no matter what the option having most votes will win. So I can't say voting here is unfair. All I'm saying I do believe both Ettin and Haunt were at disadvantage against the sister. Calling her nothing but tits in armor may not be fair but at least a fraction will vote on her because of that but you are right here this is not a major factor. What I wrote about her being distinctively different from other choices IMO is the major factor.



Regarding future g2g vote. I have no way of guessing how it will go. It may be 5:2:1 so clearly the method of voting will not matter and my objections will be invalid then. However; you can't really predict if it won't be 7:6:2 and then if majority of people voting on the third faction would prefer 2nd one given the choice about the first one then it would mean that the faction who won wasn't really the best (edit: sorry not the best as it can't be measured by votes, I should have said most popular).



All I'm doing here is voicing my opinions. And after I gave it some thoughts (please mind I'm only trying to make the g2g better) I had another idea. Let's pick 3 factions like it was said from begging but if by the end of the voting none of them got 50% of votes why not allow shorter 2nd round between those 2 with most votes? You wouldn't even need to reset votes, just allow those from 3rd faction to be recast on one of those 2. (Similar to how presidential elections in my country work. If no candidate get's 50% there is 2nd round with only 2 best candidates to make sure the winner really got majority of votes).

Stealth_Hawk wrote:
No, I think Vieux is saying people are too apathetic to inform themselves about which entries they would actually like to play. No one is calling any one else stupid here I don't think lol



But that leads to another question: when 99 walls of text are heaped on us all at once, is it within the realm of reason to expect everybody to find the faction they like?

That's it.

Lulz! wrote:
(...)

I don't think this analysis of the G2G vote is quite fair. While I don't doubt that there were likely some posters that disliked the idea of a Sisters of Mercy hero, to say that these posters are the majority of voters seems unlikely. I would wager a guess that actually, a large number of people are just voters that post no opinions on the forums; in other words, those who post and vote and those who just vote are two groups, with the former probably being a smaller subset of the latter.

I'd admit I may have generalized this too much. It was not really we hated the idea of sister of mercy. I'd say I feel like majority of voters preferred "nonhuman" character as native. Sisters struct us as too humanoid. I'd not say everyone that voted haunt or ettin disliked sister of mercy. All I am saying is I believe given the choice between either of them and sister they would not choose sister. At the moment the choice is more like pretty woman with breast in armor and a monster but "monster" got split on 2 different votes so that choice is at disadvantage. I'm not opposed to 3 ways votes as general. But I'd say in that instance and with faction choice it would not produce the best result. Especially that combined loosing factions will probably have at lest half more votes than winning one. That said I think the choice about cartographer, mage and gardener works well with 3 way voting. Those 3 both have unique qualities but in race 2 of entries share similar quality (being nonhuman) while 3rd is more human. Similar with the faction vote it may be possible 2 entries will share common quality and 3rd one will be more distinctive so it will stand out more. I believe it was even scientifically proved that if we have 2 similar choices we tend to go with 3rd one but I may have made it up ^^"

I think I can agree that it would probably have been better if the devs had reviewed the submissions and selected a few that were interesting according to the criteria of engaging lore and gameplay, within the vision of the game, and possibility of implementation. I think 99 entries was probably too much; if it was narrowed down to about 20 or so, I think I would've made a more informed vote than I did (I just used Nos' complied list and choose some factions I thought were interesting and voted for those, which was about 4 factions in total). To this end, I think Amplitude should probably think about having a person who is dedicated to this aspect (G2G, community feedback, etc.) of the company, or a Community Manager of sorts, kind of like Star Citizen has. I love the fact that Amplitude does stuff like this and it's one of the reasons why I enjoy their games so much, but like Faust and others have said, it could be better, and I think having a dedicated person from the company to the community would go a long way to making it so.



For the contest itself, I disagree that word limit would have made it better. Those who wanted to participate ought to have been given the ability to expand on their faction's mechanics as well as their lore; it seemed to me that the contest was made so that participants could exercise a great amount of creativity in faction creation as well as thoughtfulness. 300-500 words doesn't really give you the space to be able to do that well, and I think such a limit would only be helpful when the number of entries is staggering (like it is right now).

"Wredniak3000" wrote:
But let's leave the current mechanics alone and let's focus on g2g mechanic which IMO is much more FLAWED.

3 way vote imo is not the way here. Look at the current vote with ettin, haunt an sister of mercy. There were a lot of people that just hated the idea of sisters but because our votes got split on ettin and haunt sisters are (or was) leading. IMO the devs should have picked only 2 faction and made it 1vs1 or pick 4 factions and make it 2x 1v1 with both winners facing off at the "final" vote. I strongly believe with 3 factions there is good chance a vote can be split and the faction that wins will not be majority favorite. IMO that would be worst; to end with winner that majority of community is displeased.

I don't think this analysis of the G2G vote is quite fair. While I don't doubt that there were likely some posters that disliked the idea of a Sisters of Mercy hero, to say that these posters are the majority of voters seems unlikely. I would wager a guess that actually, a large number of people are just voters that post no opinions on the forums; in other words, those who post and vote and those who just vote are two groups, with the former probably being a smaller subset of the latter.

I thinkt that the call for word limit (or letters) are very resonable.

VieuxChat wrote:
Maybe 500 ?

But seriously, I already participated to a competition where you had only 300 letters (in fact 300 characters !) for writing a text. It's a very fun exercice to try.

You really to have to chose the best words for what you want to say. Try it, you'll see.

I think you are right it would be fun to try to do that but IMO this is not a right contest for such thing. Trying to limit entry to 300 characters would give huge advantage to native speakers as with so little words you would need to be really fluent with language. I'm really bad with examples but if i know word parasitic and someone else don't and have to work around it (faction taking advantage/using others) I'm already 10 characters ahead. I myself am terrible with trying to not cross such imposed limits so I'm probably biased. That said I still believe there are better ways to implement such limits. For example use 5-6 sentences, or write your entry under 100 words. The limit put on characters in my opinion would be more suited to some short story/journalist competition and IMO is much harder than other 2 I've mentioned.



And I do believe such competition would benefit for more structure and guidelines for sure. for example:

* Provide short summary (5-6 sentences)

* Describe physical features of your race in 50 words

* Suggest 3 features that would define your faction gameplay. Don't use more than 3 sentences per one feature. Try to make it similar to what is already in game or is going to be implemented in the final release. 2 of those features must resolve around minor factions.

* You are free to further discuss your ideas of the faction. However; only the ideas in those 3 first points will be considered during voting. (There is no guarantee anything below this line will make or resemble the final faction design)



That would make me a lot more comfortable not only writing the proposal of my faction but also voting on others.

adder wrote:
That would be up to the devs to decide.

I'm sure (s)he'll understand that most people are questioning on how it would be implemented, and are not calling the idea bad an sich.

I think you are missing my point ^^" I focus more on relation between those changes and the votes if people new the feature they loved the most would be cut, changed ect... As of now you really don't know to which extent those factions are going to be implemented and imo that causes some confusion.

Wredniak2003 wrote:
TBH I'm not going to discuss how I view the current methods for this contest. My idea is doing rather well but the closer it gets the bitter I can potentially become about whole thing. I'm only human and I clearly believe my idea is probably the best ^^" I obviously lack the objectivity needed to be proper judge of that so I try to stay away from such discussions as much as possible to avoid situations when I may come across too strong.



I'm currently pretty close with Panczasu on 4th and 5th place and I think I will be rather disappointed if the faction that beats us will not be possible to implement fully (especially the floating cities as imo that is this faction "selling point"). I clearly thing devs should have read the list and cross off those factions that in their opinion would require extensive changes to work. Even If that meant delaying the vote by couple days or even a week.



But let's leave the current mechanics alone and let's focus on g2g mechanic which IMO is much more FLAWED.

3 way vote imo is not the way here. Look at the current vote with ettin, haunt an sister of mercy. There were a lot of people that just hated the idea of sisters but because our votes got split on ettin and haunt sisters are (or was) leading. IMO the devs should have picked only 2 faction and made it 1vs1 or pick 4 factions and make it 2x 1v1 with both winners facing off at the "final" vote. I strongly believe with 3 factions there is good chance a vote can be split and the faction that wins will not be majority favorite. IMO that would be worst; to end with winner that majority of community is displeased.



(I acknowledge that there is no way to please everyone that are just my thought on the situation).



EDIT: Limit to 300 letters??? Really I have given longer assignments to first graders that just started learning English... I could probably write one sentence containing 300 characters. And I believe my entry was at least 12000 letters ^^" Imagine cutting that down... Hell the name of my faction is 18 letters alone... I can understand need for shor summary but don't make it 2 sentences long...

Maybe 500 ?

But seriously, I already participated to a competition where you had only 300 letters (in fact 300 characters !) for writing a text. It's a very fun exercice to try.

You really to have to chose the best words for what you want to say. Try it, you'll see.

I think neither the posters nor the voters (and the devs not, too) want the scenario that the winning faction has to be disqualified afterwards because it can`t be implemented or was against the rules or takes away the creativity of quest 2 and 3. A better announcement and preselection before the poll could have made lots of things easier here.

Wredniak2003 wrote:
Ah, but what would really mean impossible to implement? All those factions will be modified to fit the game.

That would be up to the devs to decide.

I'm feeling pretty bad for Star Dreamers creator, we are pretty negative about his faction ^^"

I'm sure (s)he'll understand that most people are questioning on how it would be implemented, and are not calling the idea bad an sich.

adder wrote:
One could, the next time, let people enter the contest by filling in a sort of 'contact-form' but then with the content for the competition. And then let the entries by randomly put in a vote, without the names of the creators. This way the only thing some people will know is what faction/design/... they made, and you eliminate the voting for a person, rather then for his idea.



You could this also randomize the order every time a vote is made, so that the people at the first and last place don't get an advantage.

I'd like this idea, if there was a chance to edit things up to the day of contest. Have s.th. like a bound hidden submission, then close it and make it uneditable, automatically, at the onset of the contest. I'd do that out of the personal experience that a forum can have hiccups, you can miss spelling errors and you will change your mind after early submission in a week and change or add important stuff during the course of the week.

It also deprives the community of the chance to preread the factions at any given time.

melkathi wrote:
I was thinking about the issue you raise about mods not being allowed to participate in many events hosted by other companies. I certainly understand why they do it. But as you say yourself, exclusion is not a nice thing. Especially in communities like this one, where moderators are simple fans themselves. Excluing them would be a rather harsh slap in the face "Sorry, you like our games too much to make suggestions"

If I were paid by Amplitude, I'd totally agree that I shouldn't participate in the contest. I'm sacrificing some of my free time, here, to police the forum, give advice and/or bring myself in about gameplay matters, like this faction contest. As Amplitude originally made the most active community-members moderators, it'd have been very unfair to say: "Can you be moderators, please? You'll just be deprived of the right to participate in any contests for helping us so much. Thx." XD

PANCZASU wrote:
BTW Instant run-off voting system, as awesome as it is, probably wouldn't fix the issues we're currently having in the poll.

The sheer number of entries would have guaranteed that this is a problem, no matter how it is handled, unless there had been a preselection down to a manageable size. As a contestant, myself, I took care not to do any selection whatsoever on any participant. That'd have been unfair to the extreme. The devs, if anyone, should have done that.

Wintersong wrote:
Define well? If it's just "top in the charts", isn't only one mod up there? If it means more than 3 or 4 votes, yeah, lots of people are doing well. You don't need mods to define polls as popularity contests

#1: Cultists of the Eternal End - Nosferatiel (22183 XP & moderator)

#2: Star Dreamers - Lynx_Gnt (295 XP)

#3: The Nereides - Veronica (1395 XP)



Popularity will help, for sure, but it doesn't seem to be the dominant driving mechanism.

Nos is winning cause his proposal IS actually good.



And the affinity of the "Cultists of the End" would be a great win for this young game.



And maybe he has some extra votes cause he is at the top but he would even without it leading this contest.



I know before the whole election started that he would be the favourite.



I will be proofed right when he will win the G2G vote with a great margin.



So i disagree at the point to not allow moderators to participate. This is a bottonless pit cause we would have to forbid all the VIPs the participation just out of the cause that they had way much more time to play the game and get a feeling for affinitys and stuff.

ResonanceMask wrote:
This is also why it'd be nice to see poll statistic. It would allow us to see what voters who voted nereids also voted. Like, did they vote only water based factions, or did they vote first few choices along them, etc. I'd like to know if people who voted my idea also voted other minor faction alliance ideas or if they voted "stealthy" ideas like maskari. Or if they all just voted reptilians.

I don't know if you can get full statistical data about the voting. Even then, numbers by themselves mean nothing. Different people interpret same numbers in different ways. You may get to see some tendencies in some cases if they are strong enough.



The more items a poll has, the more chances of the results being deviants. The less people know about the topic, the more chances of deviations. If you check this poll:

/#/endless-legend/forum/6-game-design/thread/2951-poll-what-menu-shortcut-do-you-use

Niether the first option nor the last are winning. There are less options to choose from. People know all the items referenced without having to read some potential walls of text. No personal investment in the design of those icons by the voters. Each poll has its own parameters.



There are lots of factors that influence the numbers in the polls. Current results of Quest 1 would be different (not sure at to which point though) if the factions had only included the name and not also the keywords and author. If Quest 2's poll is done like Quest 1's (tons of items, keywords...), you can expect similar issues.

PANCZASU wrote:
We would still need a third best entry so sorry but no

No, we wouldn't. As soon as you generate the new list to determine the third winner, we concede to the first option of the new list. To be fair, we would generate both lists using a random number generator to determine the order of the items. At that point, we may as well forget about lists and just pick the G2G candidates by random number generator.



Or allow the devs to cherry pick them.

Faust wrote:
Allow me to preface this by saying that this post's contents are based on personal presumptions and may not reflect the way Amplitude feels about their current methods at all, and that there are lots of submissions that are better than mine so this has nothing to do with me being butthurt that I'm not winning.



With that said...



I know that I've learned a bit from the way this faction design competition has been handled. It hasn't turned out too badly, but I hope that Amplitude has learned some things, too. Namely:



1. A poll is nothing but a popularity contest. This is pretty evident by the fact that submissions by prominent forum members are almost all doing well, and this is why a lot of companies don't allow their forum mods or employees to take part in contests. I'm certainly not intending to comment on the quality of the designs by those members (most of them look good), but it's difficult to look at the results and conclude that popularity has nothing to do with it. I also think that generally we should strive to allow everyone to participate if we can.



In general, though, I think that allowing a popularity contest to determine the direction a game goes is bad. Not only will we sometimes sacrifice quality by doing this, but it's better if the game has a cohesive vision determined by the developers rather than it being a haphazard assemblage of other peoples' visions. If it were up to me (and it isn't), in the future I would have the devs simply select the final 3 best submissions for us to vote for on the G2G system. This ensures that popularity has nothing to do with it, that the vision for the game remains consistent, and that the highest quality suggestions are implemented rather than simply the suggestions of the most respected members of the forum. On the other hand, it may be possible to mitigate this with the Instant-Runoff Polling system suggested in the tech support forum, in which case continuing to use the forum as a polling method may work just fine.



2. Forum software sucks for game design. As mentioned above, though, there is the possibility for improvement here. I hope it's implemented before the next round of polling.



3. One thing forum mods are wonderful for is organizing and carrying out precisely this kind of contest. Amplitude may want to consider getting in contact with the mods and working with them to have the next time we do this be organized by mods, who have already shown a good deal of initiative in cataloging, categorizing, and advertising the submissions from this most recent contest. Having them act in an official capacity in the future may make everything run a lot more smoothly.



Anyway, that's my two bits. If anyone else has anything to add in terms of ways to improve this system, it will benefit us as a whole to talk about them and make them known to the devs and forum mods, so feel free to contribute.

I agree with this so much, I've quoted the whole thing just to have it repeated. Please take note here, Amplitude. If something isn't changed, I'll stop participating in this G2G stuff.

Wintersong wrote:
Should we skip the Quest 2 once the voting list is generated and concede to first and last entries?

We would still need a third best entry so sorry but no

PANCZASU wrote:




I guess that with the rise of Amplitude's popularity and more people visitng these forums and posting submissions, this is no longer a viable strategy because it requires too much work.

Not necessarily. It may be more work to try and make a winner fit gameplay if the ideas are too "out there"

Wintersong wrote:
Like some people in the late stages of the voting, voting mostly for the leading ones as to not waste their votes?

I think this will inevitably happen a lot as long as results are shown before the poll closes.