Considering only one can win per week, can we reduce the maximum number of submissions per player?

Considering forum submissions are the ones which get the most voting activity, it’s an obvious place to concentrate all those excess submissions, since you can resubmit the same forums each week. Create a bunch of forums and keep reusing = guaranteed chocolate scoops for dom.

They need to be capped.

No, I’m saying it’s easier to reuse entries for forum suggestions week after week, since other areas require ideas to be adapted or created from scratch, and with forum suggestions it’s a simple copypasta. Effectively making it a dumping ground for average (but not bad enough to be immediately voted out) ideas whose sole purpose is to gather chocolate scoops for dom, if you run out of time or inspiration elsewhere, or simply can’t be bothered that week.

I haven’t been carefully tracking how forum submissions are going, but I do see alot of the same ideas when I bother to vote. A cap on forum idea submissions makes sense even if there’s the possibility of stuffing the ballot just for the purposes of dom.

Fortunato Posted:

Considering only one can win per week, can we reduce the maximum number of submissions per player?

This is probably a bad idea. Allowing everyone to increase their buildr scores through time, quality and effort over time gives people to do, and incentive to do it. More entries in the pool isn’t at all necessarily a bad thing, since the most popular entries will still float slowly up to the top to be viewed slightly more often than the “bad” or unpopular ones.

More entries, pages of them even, also reduces the chance that inferior suggestions will get through, since the user has a lot more to look at to “compare” which entries are “good” and to choose one or more that speak more directly to them.

No one is forcing anyone to vote for any entries. Seeing that there are ten pages of them therefore shouldn’t feel like an obligation. Long-term, with more players, the same result will roughly occur if you voted on 10 pages or 2.

More entries also means it’s more work for people to “cheat,” mbum downvote, or cherry-pick their votes. This is clearly a good thing.

meeeeeee Posted:

Considering forum submissions are the ones which get the most voting activity, it’s an obvious place to concentrate all those excess submissions, since you can resubmit the same forums each week. Create a bunch of forums and keep reusing = guaranteed chocolate scoops for dom.

They need to be capped.

You’re not understanding how things work. Just because you have a ****load of entries, does not mean they will get voted on. In fact, you may spend a year and a half of damn good submissions to be able to submit 100 pretty good forum ideas, but by the sheer fact that you did so, each one, individually, will get fewer votes. Most people lose interest in voting rapidly. Plk has one of the highest buildr scores, and many of her entries may only get one scoop per week. With more entries in the pool from other people, possibly less. Considering the amount of effort it takes to make a decent entry that can “survive,” a scoop or two in a week doesn’t seem broken.

You get an advantage for having more entries, but that advantage decreases in scope proportionally to how many you actually submit. This seems ideal. Even if we were to lower submissions, why not, say, halve people’s buildr scores? Why call for an outright cap, when caps, when hit, take away any incentive for improvement? Who would do such a thing?

PROFILE:

meeeeeeeeee[Brainfreeze]

Vitals

Clbum: Troll

Level: 35

Cred: 100000000

Buildr Score: 1 <—————

Oh. I get it. *rolleyes*

[Mod note: Everything up to the rolleyes was just fine. I’m retroactively reminding buildr posters to keep things civil, because some users complained about the tone of this post. —JB]

Bashy was banned for this post by Evil Trout

Were chocolate not a part of the equation, I would propose charging 10 buildr points per forum idea submitted. Thus, it would be much more difficult to flood. However, since chocolate is a part of the equation, I would admit I am somewhat befuddled. I’ve taken advantage of the flood of chocolate myself from time to time. Is chocolate powerful with a high buildr score? Yes. Is it strong enough to beat a coordinated effort from a large and reasonably well organized klan? No. I tied with plk last season because GGM had a good 7 players in my final bracket and we worked together to make sure we got what we wanted.

Does this alter the fact that Bashy and plk are simply flooding the forum entry pile with everything they can, throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks? No. The psychology that most players who submit to buildr are submitting under is that you have one good idea and submit it until it wins. Obviously this strategy is flawed and the better strategy is to get a score of 10-20 and just submit like crazy around 10-11 PM sunday night (maybe save a few for monday). Who cares if your idea is derivative or uninteresting? All that matters is winning. Right?

Bashy Posted:

My “advantage” over someone who has… zero? Oh, it’s so unfair. I’m so sorry. Please continue promoting caps, nerfs and limits while absolutely not participating in any way in the thing about which you’re talking.

do you deny that you submit mostly forum ideas, then if nothing else keep mental notes as to which have done well and resubmit them the next week?

Fortunato Posted:

do you deny that you submit mostly forum ideas, then if nothing else keep mental notes as to which have done well and resubmit them the next week?

Not lately. Because a bunch of whiny little twits have decided to try to figure out “which entries are Bashy and plk’s,” I’ve been making all new entries. Which have also done well. Probably because, I dunno, I copied them from somewhere, or… I dunno, something that results in not taking responsibility for only the quality of your own submissions and the results they get.

Barring people hating you and trying to sabotage your entries, why wouldn’t you keep resubmitting the same forums? If it ended with a 25 last week, odds are it will do about as good the next week and it will eventually win, even if just for a lack of anything better.

I’d rather have some pretty good forums waiting for a week with no excellent forums than have people give up and leave us with crap forums because everyone who’s at least somewhat amusing gave up because they haven’t won.

It is unfortunate if Dom obsession has lead to people trying to sabotage entertaining forum ideas because someone might get ten more chocolate scoops, as though the scoops you get from buildrs are somehow significant to the competition. Next thing you know, people will stalk INCIT to make sure that no one in their bracket ever wins and gets any scoops there, either.

Fortunato Posted:

You’re still filling the system up with them and thus ending up with a greater proportion of overall votes. My essential point in making this thread is not to argue the quality of your submissions (several of them I’ve actually enjoyed writing for) but rather that inevitably, in a system where we are required to vote on 15 pages of submissions, it will largely end up being a matter of whoever can submit the most, as voting on 15 pages is a pretty big chore. But I suppose you would contest that too.

Dude. Do you read what you’re saying? You’re basically saying that I’m doing something unfair by submitting the forums that I’ve earned the right to be able to submit, through quality and effort. What the hell?

I can submit 20 submissions a week. You just said there are 15 pages already of entries still alive. Since a ton get -5’ed and then don’t show up, and it’s only the first 24 hours, you can plainly see that often over 300 forums get submitted every week. How do I have some unfair advantage? Do you think that I started out with a buildr score of 14 or something? Again, I earned the right to be able to submit this amount. There are nearly 50 other people with buildr scores higher than mine. Why aren’t you ****ing at them and their unfairness? Oh, right, because they’re either your friend, or they aren’t beating you.

As for your whole “oh my god I have to vote on 15 pages of entries,” no, you don’t, unless you’re some obsessive compulsive.

Look, if I lose at Dom Fave Flava because I can only beat forums up to a streak of 80 and other people have worked their way up to being able to go up to 88, I say, “Oh well, have to do better.” I don’t sit here whining and trying to find ways to try to kneecap anyone who’s doing better than I am.

Write better and better entries until they’re what the players like, and continually improve them and create new ones when you earn the right to submit them. You’ll win eventually. By your own merit, instead of whining everyone down to your level.

If you spent as much time writing good entries as you did whining, I guarantee you’d do better.

Would it make you happier if he submitted ideas to the current forum, like Grayson does, and just won that every week instead? It’s not a huge difference where you submit your ideas. If you submit them to forum ideas, that’s volatile category and you risk getting -5’d earlier. If you spread the submissions around, you might or might not get a few fewer votes, but those are safer submissions and more likely to last the week, which might mean more votes. If you don’t like that people can win by force of numbers, well fine, but I don’t think you can exactly blame the players for that when it’s not our game design and not anything we haven’t told CZ about anyway.