Nillo Posted:

’s what moderators are for. If the devs don’t have the time to kick abusers they should start looking for friendly well-meaning players who can do it for them. That is, unless they come up with a different way to solve the problem. Like removing the domination thing and Flezz payouts from the Forumbuilder altogether.

My 2 cents on this matter is that the abuse takes place because this is an automated system. Any automated but unmoderated system that pays out any kind of advantage will be abused. I see two things that would help reduce the amount of abuse that is done on forumbuildr.

First, if the automated removal process is considered a necessity, then add a time or max vote factor into the removal process. Either give ideas a base time (such as 24 hours) for maximum review before automatically removing it from the system, or use a maximum votes condition so that the idea cannot be automatically removed until a certain number of votes have been recorded (preferably high enough to overcome a single clan or group of clans from continuing their abuse).

Second, why is the selection system automated? Having the most votes should not automatically move an idea into the next forumbuildr slot. Instead, have a dev (or moderator if devs don’t have time) review the idea list, with the number of positive votes being a key weight on the decision. Manual review ideas will show up blatant system gaming, and can lead to an audit to identify the troublemakers. It might still be advisable to auto-remove low score reviews (I’m not a big fan of auto-removal, but acknowledge that there might be a need) from public view, but leave the actual idea submission in place for the manual review.