Should authors of XXX champion be allowed to vote on guides for XXX champion?
@CounterSnipe, yes, the percentages are not great for display purposes. These are actually the guide ranks, which are calculated with a formula (not invented by us) which attempts to rank guides with limited voter information fairly against those with more voter information. The result is that new guides start out with an average score and float higher.
Other sites that use a ranking system like ours tend to hide it in the background, and display the real score. I would like to do something like this but, I'm just not sure what the reaction will be. If your guide has 9 / 11, your "real" score is 82%, but your ranked score is going to be 69% because of the formula. If we display 82%, and your guide appears lower than a guide with say 79% (which has a lot more voter information), we're afraid readers as well as authors may complain that it's broken. Instead, we could hide percentages and just display vote counts, or something along those lines. I'm not sure how people will feel about that either, though.
If anyone has thoughts on the above, I'd love to hear it :)
To address your concern over troll votes, I want to mention that a lot of people throw the term "troll vote" around very easily, especially when it's a negative vote on their own content. Often times it turns in to "I know my guide is awesome, so this down vote is obviously a troll", which is not fair to the voter. Have you ever down voted a guide? Did you wait until you had been on the site a few weeks before you started voting? Probably not. Are you trolling? Probably not.
There are many, many reasons users may vote the way they did, it's just too easy to assume it is trolling.
In response to your suggestions;
1) As said above I'd like to display a nicer score, but we still need the ranks in the back end. Does a guide with 1 up vote 0 down votes belong at the top of every list on the site? No. The formula gives new guides a chance against existing guides without promoting content that we don't have a high level of confidence about too quickly.
2) We've considered this in the past too. I'm not sure if it will help. Improving the display of scores/votes may be a better solution.
You are correct, it is a tough one :) Our system is very complicated under the surface, we have gone MUCH further than a lot of sites do in trying to manage things fairly and block cheating. You don't see it, because it is behind the scenes. However there are limitations to what we can do, before it starts affecting honest users of the site.
Other sites that use a ranking system like ours tend to hide it in the background, and display the real score. I would like to do something like this but, I'm just not sure what the reaction will be. If your guide has 9 / 11, your "real" score is 82%, but your ranked score is going to be 69% because of the formula. If we display 82%, and your guide appears lower than a guide with say 79% (which has a lot more voter information), we're afraid readers as well as authors may complain that it's broken. Instead, we could hide percentages and just display vote counts, or something along those lines. I'm not sure how people will feel about that either, though.
If anyone has thoughts on the above, I'd love to hear it :)
To address your concern over troll votes, I want to mention that a lot of people throw the term "troll vote" around very easily, especially when it's a negative vote on their own content. Often times it turns in to "I know my guide is awesome, so this down vote is obviously a troll", which is not fair to the voter. Have you ever down voted a guide? Did you wait until you had been on the site a few weeks before you started voting? Probably not. Are you trolling? Probably not.
There are many, many reasons users may vote the way they did, it's just too easy to assume it is trolling.
In response to your suggestions;
1) As said above I'd like to display a nicer score, but we still need the ranks in the back end. Does a guide with 1 up vote 0 down votes belong at the top of every list on the site? No. The formula gives new guides a chance against existing guides without promoting content that we don't have a high level of confidence about too quickly.
2) We've considered this in the past too. I'm not sure if it will help. Improving the display of scores/votes may be a better solution.
You are correct, it is a tough one :) Our system is very complicated under the surface, we have gone MUCH further than a lot of sites do in trying to manage things fairly and block cheating. You don't see it, because it is behind the scenes. However there are limitations to what we can do, before it starts affecting honest users of the site.
@jhoijhoi, of course if there was a way to weed out any such anti-competitive voting, I would do it in a heartbeat. I'd love to hear more ideas on how we could detect this safely, I'm just not sure it's possible :( Every system that has been discussed in the past, has way too many negatives to be implemented.
CounterSnipe
<Member>
<Member>
Why not adopt a "like vs dislike" system similar to the one solomid.net is using? They have a small bar that displays the number of people who like the guide (green) vs the people who dislike the guide (red). I really liked that system when I was reading guides because it allowed me to see a lot of good guides from multiple players. Now, I'm not saying you should do the exact same thing here, but maybe you can consider an off-shoot of that mechanism and incorporate it under the actual numerical value of the guide?
Yeah, if we decided to move away from showing the rank, the remaining options are showing your actual score (as a percent, or bars, or some other format) or just vote counts. On DOTAFire you will see we display bars, though this is still the rank score, not the real score.
It's just a pretty big change and we're not sure if people will freak out.
It's just a pretty big change and we're not sure if people will freak out.
CounterSnipe
<Member>
<Member>
Why not just ask the community if they would like a change? Maybe make a post with a poll and throw it on the home page so that everyone who comes on the site can see it (similar to how you guys had that in house advertisement with the little akali picture). I think this would be a good chance to get user feedback instead of just discussing things on the forums. O.o
Even after reading the entire thread, i still fail to see the downsides of having the initial system that JhoiJhoi spoke of.
I mean, sure, you could make a new account and then downvote on that one.
Wouldn't that be pretty easily countered by simply putting a "2-day vote" prevention on new accounts?
Since Mobafire is not based around your amounts of posts (Like some forums won't allow you to post link/pictures untill 10 posts or so), this does not seem unfair.
If you came here to vote for a guide, then guess what; It's still here in 2 days!
I realize this won't stop everyone from doing the "i got my own guide"-downvote, but trust me, a lot of people will lose the "heat of the moment" which is what im making them make a new account just to do this...
It should also be pretty easy to detect if the ONLY thing an account had done, was to downvote the highest rated XXXX guide, or some of the highest rated guides, within a short timespan.
Honestly, if there's a guide that i don't like, i generally don't downvote, i just don't vote at all until i've checked whether the author is willing to adjust, or if someone can bring up good argument to counter my own.
I see some flaws, but it's preferable to how it is now.
It hardly matters in the bigger picture, but the initial reason i left MOBAFire about a year ago was because it was hard to sort out bad from good guides because of troll-downvotes and this kind of downvoting in particular...
I mean, sure, you could make a new account and then downvote on that one.
Wouldn't that be pretty easily countered by simply putting a "2-day vote" prevention on new accounts?
Since Mobafire is not based around your amounts of posts (Like some forums won't allow you to post link/pictures untill 10 posts or so), this does not seem unfair.
If you came here to vote for a guide, then guess what; It's still here in 2 days!
I realize this won't stop everyone from doing the "i got my own guide"-downvote, but trust me, a lot of people will lose the "heat of the moment" which is what im making them make a new account just to do this...
It should also be pretty easy to detect if the ONLY thing an account had done, was to downvote the highest rated XXXX guide, or some of the highest rated guides, within a short timespan.
Honestly, if there's a guide that i don't like, i generally don't downvote, i just don't vote at all until i've checked whether the author is willing to adjust, or if someone can bring up good argument to counter my own.
I see some flaws, but it's preferable to how it is now.
It hardly matters in the bigger picture, but the initial reason i left MOBAFire about a year ago was because it was hard to sort out bad from good guides because of troll-downvotes and this kind of downvoting in particular...
I think that's a great idea, Athan, but unlikely to be implemented. I don't know how hard it'd be to disable a new user voting privileges for 2 days, especially as some people join the site just to vote on a guide they find particularly good.
We've had suggestions like these in the past, where users couldn't vote until they had 20 posts or something similar. While I LOVE this idea, as it'd cut down on "I'll make a new account and downvote anonymously" people, it'll also cut down on the legitimate voters who just want to vote and never say anything.
LOVE the idea that people can't vote until 25 posts, but it's not reasonable and Matt and Flash wouldn't do it.
We've had suggestions like these in the past, where users couldn't vote until they had 20 posts or something similar. While I LOVE this idea, as it'd cut down on "I'll make a new account and downvote anonymously" people, it'll also cut down on the legitimate voters who just want to vote and never say anything.
LOVE the idea that people can't vote until 25 posts, but it's not reasonable and Matt and Flash wouldn't do it.
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