Jalapeno Bootyhole Posted:

To tell you the truth, I’m still bewildered about the point of this exercise and what the outcome was supposed to be. At this point, I’m bumuming it’s some kind of vague frustration over…something. At the risk of sounding naive, would anyone on the inside care to explain it to me?

For a year now people have talked about the voting system, how it is completely open to abuse and manipulation. The general response is “we look and rarely see it.” That is awesome, but just means that people are being sneakier than you think. Abuse has been widespread.

More recently players tried to initiate a serious discussion about focused spamming – decent Forumbuildr players using all their subs in one area resulting in a natural advantage. I said it before, no one is doing anything wrong, however the system itself has created something that is fairly easy to manipulate. If people don’t think it is an advantage to be able to submit 20 – 40 forums on Sunday night they are seriously mistaken.

When it is not a direct “Hey, this is my forum and logo, go vote for it.”, the manipulation advantage seems to come from the power to flood. I think the logo spam was a lot of “why not?” I don’t think Johnny Mac had anything specific in mind when he started it. Some of those who jumped in were purely interested in earning scoops. Some wanted to show what could be done with no sort of limits on submissions and a little bit of forum/idc chatter.

Really, meeeeeeeeee is right, Inertia is right. People are bored and most of those people have a very troll based nature.

As long as there is a voting system, it is going to be subject to manipulation. I don’t think there is anything that will ever be able to be done about it, but hey, **** happens.

The bigger concern right now seems to be the ability to flood virtually bumuring a higher success rate. I’m not sure if it has been proposed before, but have you considered limiting submissions to x per day?

Day one x is total allowed submissions divided by 7, or 7 submissions, whichever was greater. 
Day two x is total remaining submissions divided by 4, or 7 submissions, whichever is greater.
Day three x is total remaining submissions divided by 2, or 7 submissions, whichever is greater.
Day four all remaining submissions may be used.

What this would mean would be someone with a large buildr score would still have a number advantage, but not an overwhelming one. That advantage would increase with each day, which is fine, people who have busted their bums deserve to gain an advantage, however it would spread things out enough so that it would be harder to “game the system.”

An even easier solution would be to simply create Forumbuildr seasons as has been done for Domination. Retain the overall count like the overall medal count so there is a show of progressive and continued dedication, but reset seasonal buildr score totals 3 or 4 times a year.

I don’t understand why “seasons” haven’t been created for every competitive aspect of the game. How on earth can new players be encouraged to try, to have a game goal, if the only answer is for them to wait for the people already playing to get bored and quit? Outlast is the least interesting method of achievement in any game environment.

It is frustrating to see the same problem in Forumbuildr that existed a year ago and rather than a trend toward a solution, a new problem has emerged due to to steady march of buildr score. It is frustrating to see Itembuildr introduced without thought as to how the items will impact the existing game. It is frustrating to see the the klan vanilla problem taken to the other extreme making it completely worthless and to hear from BB2 that while a dom committee was recruited it is likely that nothing will really be done before Episode 3. Even if everything was hunky dory, people would want to act out from time to time. The site is marketed to trolls, what on earth do you all expect?