I’ve only been watching itembuildr for like two weeks now, and it’s already glaringly obvious to me that all the things people have complained about in here need to be fixed. The presence of elimination via downvoting, coupled with the fairly heavy level of competition, means that the majority of the worthwhile submissions are eliminated almost immediately. There were a few today that I thought were pretty interesting, but they’re either already gone or well on their way out, leaving a handful of mediocre submissions to win by default.

I understand that humor is a very subjective thing, and I’m pretty open-minded when it comes to what could be considered “funny” in a submission, but it’s a rarity that anything of even the remotest quality survives past the first absurd hour of voting. By the end of voting rounds, you’re lucky if there’s any more than two submissions left in either category, and this is ridiculous.

As it stands, itembuildr is basically a lottery system that rewards people for submitting terrible ideas and, by extension, reduces the quality of the overall content we can expect from Episode 3 when it finally rolls around.