welcome to the classic battle of preferred voting systems. in this case, something like direct vs representative democracy. on one hand, most people won't vote, so what everyone will get will be dictated by the small few that do, so to make sure it's the best choice, it's helpful to have curated votes hold more weight. on the other hand, though, that's just changing the decision from one small group of people, to another even smaller group of people, to the point that it becomes difficult to actually justify calling it a democracy. it also leads to a kind of... is culture sink the right term? where a small group of like-minded people upvote each other, giving each other more sway in votes, while the wide variety of differing opinions end up left by the wayside. it's not that that small group of opinions is more "right" than the other opinions, but because of mutual upvotes, they end up being treated as the "right" opinions, dominating votes. which results in those who don't feel supported leaving the voting pool, giving them even more sway.

I'm a proponent for direct democracy, myself, so I get the frustration. ultimately, the problem with direct democracy is a matter of information delivery, and with the internet connecting everyone with information nearly instantly, that issue is no longer an issue. that said, at the end of the day, part of the agreement for taking part of a democracy is accepting the fact that, sometimes, you lose.

now, I'm still holding out for a "far future" victory, for much the same reasons as many of the commenters in that post (like the very first comment), and am honestly gonna be pretty disappointed if endless ends up winning again. there's nothing wrong with the endless series, but the endless series is, at the end of the day, science fantasy, not science fiction, and I'd like to see where humankind can go. not horatiokind.

@PotatoesAreFrenchFries and @ridesdragons What votes are You refering to ??? Like polls ??? I have not noticed any polls to vote on here in the forums, or are You simply refering to the questions in the survey You can fill out after You complete a OpenDev game ??? Some of those have 3 options You can chose at once. 

Maybe You are simply refering to the "upvote" function on the threads ??? I mostly forget to even use my points from that on threads. I'm sure others do as well. Sometimes I remember to use them, but not that often. No idea how much focus and attention Amplitude acctually place on the number of points voted on a thread. Maybe it has very little impact on their decisions, maybe alot ???

If I have missed som type polls here somewhere, please link me to them, as I'd like to vote as well if possible.

Lord_Funk wrote:

@PotatoesAreFrenchFries and @ridesdragons What votes are You refering to ??? Like polls ??? I have not noticed any polls to vote on here in the forums, or are You simply refering to the questions in the survey You can fill out after You complete a OpenDev game ??? Some of those have 3 options You can chose at once. 

Maybe You are simply refering to the "upvote" function on the threads ??? I mostly forget to even use my points from that on threads. I'm sure others do as well. Sometimes I remember to use them, but not that often. No idea how much focus and attention Amplitude acctually place on the number of points voted on a thread. Maybe it has very little impact on their decisions, maybe alot ???

If I have missed som type polls here somewhere, please link me to them, as I'd like to vote as well if possible.

@Lord_Funk pretty sure from the numbers he listed, he's referring to the Day 1 Mod Subject vote. at the top of the screen, there's a purple bar that says humankind, with buttons home, devblog, forums, votes, sega support, and twitch drops. 

link to the vote in question

as for upvoting, if you make a bunch of threads and get a bunch of upvotes from that, your G2G score at the top right increases. rather, it increases from a lot of things. if you own all of the games and merchandise (including things like soundtrack and artbooks), you can get ~37k points due to maxing out those 9 badges. likewise, you could get a large amount of points from getting a bunch of upvotes, followers, etc. granted, the threshold for maxing those badges out are rather high and thus difficult to do. either way, people who have a lot of points from badges end up having more say on which ideas and threads are good, as well as having a bigger say in what gets voted on in votes.

for reference, the people who voted "far future" in the current vote have, on average, 11466 points, while the people who voted "endless series" have 18523 points on average. currently, 154 more people voted for "far future", yet "endless series" is currently winning by 831200 points. that's roughly 73 (or 14%) "far future" votes-worth more. alternatively, you can see it as the 368 voters for "endless series" having an equivalent voting power to 595 "far future" voters

P.S. how do you get the tags to work lol

ridesdragons wrote:

Lord_Funk wrote:

@PotatoesAreFrenchFries and @ridesdragons What votes are You refering to ??? Like polls ??? I have not noticed any polls to vote on here in the forums, or are You simply refering to the questions in the survey You can fill out after You complete a OpenDev game ??? Some of those have 3 options You can chose at once. 

Maybe You are simply refering to the "upvote" function on the threads ??? I mostly forget to even use my points from that on threads. I'm sure others do as well. Sometimes I remember to use them, but not that often. No idea how much focus and attention Amplitude acctually place on the number of points voted on a thread. Maybe it has very little impact on their decisions, maybe alot ???

If I have missed som type polls here somewhere, please link me to them, as I'd like to vote as well if possible.

@Lord_Funk pretty sure from the numbers he listed, he's referring to the Day 1 Mod Subject vote. at the top of the screen, there's a purple bar that says humankind, with buttons home, devblog, forums, votes, sega support, and twitch drops. 

link to the vote in question

as for upvoting, if you make a bunch of threads and get a bunch of upvotes from that, your G2G score at the top right increases. rather, it increases from a lot of things. if you own all of the games and merchandise (including things like soundtrack and artbooks), you can get ~37k points due to maxing out those 9 badges. likewise, you could get a large amount of points from getting a bunch of upvotes, followers, etc. granted, the threshold for maxing those badges out are rather high and thus difficult to do. either way, people who have a lot of points from badges end up having more say on which ideas and threads are good, as well as having a bigger say in what gets voted on in votes.

for reference, the people who voted "far future" in the current vote have, on average, 11466 points, while the people who voted "endless series" have 18523 points on average. currently, 154 more people voted for "far future", yet "endless series" is currently winning by 831200 points. that's roughly 73 (or 14%) "far future" votes-worth more. alternatively, you can see it as the 368 voters for "endless series" having an equivalent voting power to 595 "far future" voters

P.S. how do you get the tags to work lol

@ridesdragons Thank You for the info !!! I have acctually totally missed that whole thing. No idea how I managed that, but I did. A day where I learn something new is most often a good day. However I went there and voted now. I voted for Post-Apocalyptic which will not happen as both the others had like 4 million more voted points, but hey I'm a sucker for Post-Apocalyptic, as well as for the underdog, he he he !!! :P

I earned 1 new badge and 2 new titles for voting. Yay !!! :)

ridesdragons wrote:

Lord_Funk wrote:

@ridesdragons Thank You for the info !!! I have acctually totally missed that whole thing. No idea how I managed that, but I did. A day where I learn something new is most often a good day. However I went there and voted now. I voted for Post-Apocalyptic which will not happen as both the others had like 4 million more voted points, but hey I'm a sucker for Post-Apocalyptic, as well as for the underdog, he he he !!! :P

I earned 1 new badge and 2 new titles for voting. Yay !!! :)

...banner-blindness. gotta love it, eh?...

Eheh! Yeah, that's it. Either that, or me getting older and needing reading glasses all the time now, he he he !!! :P

ridesdragons wrote: 
...and congrats on the badge...

Thank You !!! :)

except the weight of someone's vote is not necessarily based on how passionate they are about the game or how knowledgeable they are on game design. you can get around 10-15k points from owning all the games and the relevant DLC (the content packs that aren't rated poorly on steam), but to get the 37k I meantioned earlier, you also have to buy all the stuff that is only tangentially relevant to the game (soundtracks, questpacks, etc). someone may play the game a lot, but not be interested in spending extra money on unimportant stuff or buying packs that many feel hurt the game rather than helped. but their voice is worth less than the person who bought all of that extra stuff. in this case, it is influenced primarily by money, not knowledge.

now take a look at the top 10 people on the leaderboards. more specifically, the badges they have (which is what determines their points). you'll find that most of their points comes from: playing that horatio visual novel, buying all the extra and poorly rated DLC, and pre-ordering the games, on top of buying the games and their relevant DLC. quite a few of them either have very low levels or no levels at all in badges for getting upvotes for ideas. I can't say from that whether they are knowledgeable or not - maybe they just rarely ever post ideas or threads. nothing wrong with that. I even know for a fact that at least one of them is knowledgeable on the subject, but only because I've seen his posts. but the point is, if the lion's share of their points comes from buying extra stuff, being first in line, and playing stuff that's not even the same genre as the game being voted on (or even the genre the series as a whole is based around), you cannot argue that they are significantly more knowledgeable or passionate than those down in the 10-15k range from their points alone. only a small portion of their points actually comes from playing the game or putting out good ideas/being active in the forum.

as for the guy who I know is knowledgeable, up at the very top? he's very active in the forum, and very helpful wherever he appears. and frankly, his badges actually show that as well. but do you know how many points he gets from that? 3100. and if you take out his badge for voting on votes (which arguably doesn't demonstrate his knowledge), 1600. his badge for getting an idea into the game only gives him 100 points. he got more points from having a couple of drinks with the devs. hell, that horatio visual novel thing gives him more say over what makes it into the mod than the fact that his idea made it into the game once. that should say something about how arbitrary the points are, and how unrepresentative they are on how knowledgeable or passionate a voter is.

as for my comments on democracy - they put up a vote and will select the option with the highest score. that's, by definition, a democratic event. they could have just asked a question, received feedback, and then made their decision on their own. they could have not asked anything at all. but instead they chose the democratic route of putting up to a vote and letting everyone else decide. is the company a democracy for it? no, nor did I ever suggest it was. I was talking about the style of how they made their choices in this instance. and unless they decide to go with post-apocalypse (or even a 4th option), that's what this will remain: a democratic event. and, like I said, part of participating in such an event is accepting that sometimes you lose. but accepting your loss becomes a hell of a lot more difficult when the option you picked had the most votes by a significant degree and yet you lost because the other side played that horatio game.

that's also part of the reason I mentioned representative democracy. technically, that's not what this vote is, but it's not a direct democratic vote, either, and it does suffer some of the issues rep. dem. deals with, such as leading to cases where the popular candidate lost because of outside factors. and the US goes crazy every time it happens. both sides of the party line flip out when it occurs (well, when they are on the losing end, anyway). and just like with rep. dem votes, it becomes more and more difficult to argue that those outside factors are beneficial to the vote every time it happens. especially when it leads to people no longer voting as a result.

TravlingCanuck wrote:

snip

On the plus side, you got to vote.

People like me who were too oblivious to notice that such a survey exists didn't even register an opinion. 

So if not a true democracy, at lease this survey reflects some sort of meritocracy that weeds out the more dense members of the community, like me LOL

actually, you can still vote, @TravlingCanuck, the vote's still ongoing. it should be ending sometime soon, though. here ya go. that said, I almost missed the vote myself, and did miss the previous one lol. didn't know they existed. I also missed the lucy opendev because I only found out about it after it was over lol.

Wredniak2003 wrote:

ridesdragons wrote:

snip

snippity

just to be clear, I wasn't taking a knock at anyone in the top 10, I was just listing some examples and stating that no conclusions can be made about how knowledgeable or passionate (K+P, I should've abbreviated this earlier lol) someone is based on points alone, and especially not how much more K&P they are to someone further down the rankings. you can get a better gauge on that from the content of their posts. of course, if they don't post, then that doesn't say anything, either. even someone with 0 posts can be deeply K+P. introverts can be passionate, too lol.

now, I don't really wanna claim that G2G's just a gimmick. it could be, sure, but from what I've seen of the company, they seem to care at least a little bit. I certainly have more faith in them than, say, firaxis. I also don't think their idea of a "better game" is purely one that sells well (<insert your favourite-to-shit-on AAA game here>), but even if they were going with that idea, I don't think it'd really work with that model. for example, all of the DLCs in the encore section of ES2 and EL are rated poorly due to critical flaws. if we just go with the ideas of "people who spent a lot of money on their previous games and are likely to do the same for the next one", they bought those DLCs that handled themselves poorly. maybe they bought the DLC before the reviews came out? or maybe they thought the DLCs are good? if it's the prior, then they could just not care about the quality and will buy it no matter how bad it is, and if it's the latter, they might not have the best judgement of what a "better game" could be. of course, this is purely speculative and there are plenty of groups of people with varying reasons for buying the DLC (like not wanting to trust reviews and wanting to form their own opinion, or even being the reviewers that rated it poorly to begin with), so there is no real statement that can be made across the board (and there shouldn't be). I'm just point out that while it's a fact that the opinions of people who are likely to buy the game matters significantly more than those who aren't gonna buy the game, the inverse can also be argued, where people who are skeptical about purchasing are more likely to have better ideas of what's a good product than the people who bought the horse armour DLC. of course, going with the model of those who're active is not without flaws either, as those who engage in mud-slinging contests are technically the most active people on the forum, and you don't want them to have the biggest say over the design of a product lol

yea, honestly I didn't even ever look at the horatio thing because I was uninterested in it, and so I didn't even know it was a free product. even then, do I really wanna spend an hour of my life playing a visual novel about clones? lol. honestly there are a lot of easy points I could be getting, but don't, because I don't really care about getting internet points, and I never really felt like I was at a significant disadvantage in the weight behind my vote until today. and ultimately, if I really cared that much about ensuring my voice is heard, I'd be more active on here. but as it is, I've only really been active on here 3 times: during the ES2 G2G mod, the humankind military opendev, and now lol. and while I'll certainly be disappointed by the result if the endless mod ends up winning, I'm also fine with accepting it. I'll probably play it when it comes out, anyway. the cookie may not have chocolate chips in it, but it's still a cookie, and at least it doesn't have raisins in it. edit: and for clarification, no, I'm not calling the post-apocalypse choice the raisins lol

If a "democracy", I want to be able to bribe the politicians. Like a lobby of wealthy corporate hired lobbyists can do, even manage to get some of my "chills" elected into public offices, he he he !!! :) 

Even be able to sway opinions by clever influencing and buying expensive marketing campaigns for my corporate agenda. Hire factory sized groups of people in other countries to spam the forums in agreeing with my opinions.

Eheh! Just joking of course. Not meant as a political post in any direction, left or right. Just a joke, a parody, but please let's not make it a democracy after the models that we currently have. Since democracy has been in this thread in alot of the posts. (joke again) :P

With all it's flaws, I still think democracy is the best system, at least compared to many other systems we, as a humankind, have tried.

Or to use a famous historical quote: 

"Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.… "

And no, it was acctually not Churchill who came up with that. Yes he spoke the words, but he himself said he quoted someone else.

Then again Churchill is also attributed to have said: 
“The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”

Make of those condractions what You will. :)

Also @Dayvit78 is correct that privately owned forums are not required to follow "freedom of speech" nor any "democratic" type system. This is not a "public" forum per se. 

That being said, I still think Amplitude does a good job of keeping it very open and free under a certain rule set. I have seen constructive criticism of both Amplitrude and it's games here without being removed. I have never felt opressed or silenced in here. As long as we keep it mature, polite and non real life political, or break any laws or rules that do apply. No personal attacks, no inciting to riots or violence, or against other groups of people etc. I find this forum alot better than some other game companies forums I have been a frequent visitor of. If some opinions and threads feels "ignored" it's just that each and everyone has their own rights of what they chose to read and be interested in. If others are not interested in something that I happen to think is important, well then so be it. If others do not agree with me, then that is fine too. We may speak/write our opinions, but we can not and should not be able to force others to listen to-, or read them.

I do feel Amplitude is making a serious effort to interact with it's customers, us the gamers etc. In fact the attention and commitment by staff members to lurk in streamers/gamers chats to see how they handle the game, to read what people comment in there, outside Amplitudes forums. The discord channel, even being available here in these forums, is really great. Please trust me on this (after decades of online gaming), some other companies doesn't do a fraction of what Amplitude does to interact and listen to their audience/customers. Usually their few reactions or replies sounds like some spin-doctor came up with them as a part of marketing and not anything genuine. Very hollow and shallow reactions and replies alot of the time from many gaming companies.  

I know it's impossible to please everyone. Some will want the game to be more indepth, to the point of tideum micro-management. Some will want it to be easier etc. I think Amplitude is doing a good job of making it something inbetween that. Not a walk in the park, but also not a tideum of grand strategy and micro management to death. I feel very engaged and immersed as I play Humankind already in teh state it is now, even if it's not perfect or feel totally completed yet in some of it's features and mechancs/systems. Then I also look forward to more games in this series in the future that can build upon and maybe add more advanced features as we move along. Humankind II, III etc. Hopefully avoid some of the traps that other games in this genre has fallen into.

Maybe I'm naive (although I'm rarely accused of that irl by those who know me, quite the opposite) with Amplitude I do feel it's genuine. It's part of what has made me so engaged myself, their passion and interaction with us. That and that Humankind is making such awesome progress and shaping up to be a really good game in it's genre. No, not perfect (if anything can ever be perfect), but a genuine effort from Amplitude to make it as good as possible before launch. Slowly but surely getting there.

All that after I had become very cynical with alot of the gaming industry, after years of shenaingans with lootboxes and half baked games released with tons of bugs and whatnot. Feeling like all many companies wanted to do was to milk us customers/gamers dry with subpar generic stripped down products/games, riddled with lootboxes and all kinds of shenanigans, to make us take out our wallet/CC again and again and again. I had almost lost hope and thought the gaming industry had gone down the drain completely. Then I stumbled upon Humankind and Amplitude. Alot thanks to my son, who tipped me off about the game very early on (since we both play games and like turnbased strategy) when only rumours about Humankind circulated, so I added it to my radar and then later jumped on the first OpenDev.

ridesdragons wrote:

Lord_Funk wrote:

snippity snip snip democracy snipperoony

oh boy do I wish I could upvote comments lol

Eheh! Thank You !!! :)

Universal suffrage: everyone has the same vote

Weighted suffrage: some people possess more vote. 

In this case, games2gether uses "G2G PTS" as voting power. That means influential or heavy users are likely to be more powerfully represented. It is still democracy anyway with distinctive traits (both good and bad).

Judging from current situation regarding day 1 mod, I guess that old fans, who have been playing Amplitude-made games for long, prefer Endless option, while new fans, who recently started to play/have interests in Humankind prefer Far future.