Black Dragon Posted:

TL;DR – You can’t really complain about the current system when you are winning under the current system.

Of course I can!

Maybe I didn’t phrase my original post well enough – I should have used a hypothetical person rather than myself. My complaint is not that I can’t do well under the present system. It is that the present system isn’t fair and that this unfairness leads to worse submissions being entered and worse submissions being accepted.

One of my main tactics in winning is to wake up very early on Monday morning and to post as many entries as I can there and then. If I posted 10 ideas on Monday morning, came home from work and posted another 10 ideas that I’d been thinking about during work, then posted another few ideas after I’d been thinking about it during the evening, then pwned some forums or surfed the internet and posted another few ideas with that inspiration then my average submission would probably be better. They might not do quite as well (because the other players who didn’t submit at the earliest possible opportunity, but who had better submissions than me, would have a better chance of beating me), but they would be better. The average quality of the submissions which were actually accepted would also be better.

As I mentioned in my previous post, one of the big problems is the way that the “random” submissions are presented to voters who aren’t going to vote on the entire list. The ones which already have higher scores seem to be presented more often, which gives them an unfair advantage.

I’m looking at my submission list right now and at two entries in the same catagory. One has a score of 14 (14 upvotes and 0 downvotes) and the other, which I think is funnier, has a score of 8 (from 9 upvotes and 1 downvote). I can pretty much guarantee that the first one will end the week on a higher score than the second, even though I only submitted these entries 14 or so hours ago. This is because many more people will get a chance to vote on the first one, so even if 10% of them vote it down and every single remaining person upvotes the second one, the first one will still win.

Now it could be that I’m wrong and that the first entry is actually funnier. But the way that the voting is set up means that the first one has a higher chance of being included in the final build even if I’m right and it’s less funny. Worse, it has a MUCH higher chance of being included in the final build than a significantly funnier entry that is submitted later this evening, less than 24 hours after the new buildr week has stared.

In summary – I’m not suffering from the present system. That doesn’t mean that it couldn’t be improved. And the way that “random” submissions are presented to voter needs to be changed more urgently than the issue of rollover time.