plk Posted:

I guess those people don’t understand that you can stockpile submissions in any category and can resubmit them when a similar build comes up. I’ve had people tell me they do it, so it must happen some. In any case, I still don’t see why it matters if things are resubmitted. I mean, “build[ing] an increasing arsenal of forum suggestions to resubmit, tweaking them every week and weeding out losers” is a good way to improve your forum ideas and chances of winning. It’s better not to learn from past weeks’ mistakes, not improve your entries, and make yourself come up with new and increasingly obscure ideas every week so that you run out of topics and ideas? If you’re submitting topics or icons or whatever, the forum idea is there, provided for your inspiration. Forum ideas have to be thought of from scratch.

Well, as I said in what you quoted, a good post/reply/enemy takes account of the forum you’re submitting. A typical post for SPAM is not a typical post for Childhood Trauma. Logically, copying your idea from last week’s forum to this week is not an optimal strategy. It may happen some, but check the forum ideas list next week and see how many are familiar, if not exactly the same… then check thread titles and see how many are the same.

You can reuse other ideas, with some alterations – but you can’t count on their performing equally well if you just cut’n’paste them. I may be overwhelmingly new to buildr, but I’ve already waded through a flood of terrible avatars and posts and titles, and they were very definitely aimed at the current forum, not copied from last week’s.

Further, reusing the exact same idea isn’t really “learning”, particularly at the stage where you’re just changing a phrase. You’re not coming up with better ideas, you’re just selling the current idea better, and waiting for the week when the competition lags.

Me, I’m personally in favor of re-submitting a good forum idea – there are submissions I’ve seen that I like a lot better than the ones that win, and I’d like to see them implemented some day. All the same, I can see how people don’t want to reach a stage where the high-score builders are all flooding the same 40 forum ideas every week, because it’s their optimal chocolate strategy, and eventually they might win, and, hey, they’ve got a hundred submissions to use up anyway and who wants to come up with a hundred new ideas this week?

I don’t think the solution is to be found focusing on forum suggestions, but I totally see where folks complaining about forum submissions in particular are coming from.

Speaking as an inexperienced newb, I think the solution is probably more holistic. If the system doesn’t reward behaviour as much, that behaviour will decrease. For my part, I think the best first step is the suggestion to change how buildr score accrues and affects submission totals. My opinion on how to do that probably isn’t worth much, but I’d tend to do it by setting a maximum number of submissions we’d want a player to achieve, and then curving submission counts based on that. Make it asymptotically harder to get another submission as you approach the limit, and demand higher performance just to keep the score you’ve already got – and not just in terms of votes, but also of how many of your ideas are actually used, and your comparative performance with regard to the rest of the community. Keep the highest number of submissions for those who have the best performance rate percentage-wise.

If it’s hard to keep a high buildr score with forum suggestions, only one of which can possibly win in a given week, than with other suggestions, it de-incentivizes submitting more than a few of your best forum ideas every week. If the number of submissions a player can make drops significantly if they don’t stay competitive, the amount of re-submits and lulzfloods will drop too.

But I’m a newb. For all I know, that’s what’s already being done. I just haven’t heard enough to indicate so.