I've heard a lot of complaints in the forum about a "silent majority", people who don't play the game anymore but come back just for voting privileges. That is, they only come in to make sure that they vote for a character who's player they know OOC or use alts or otherwise stack the deck from a fair struggle. I just read in threads that Shorlen just ran into somebody who wanted him to log on just to vote a certain way. This is obviously an unfair thing.

Where I live, the town has an annual census check. If we don't fill out the form, we lose our voting privileges and have to go through the process of registering to vote.

How hard would it be to implement some code to see how active the "inactive" ones are, and remove voting privileges for people who have been inactive for some time. I could see if somebody was inactive for 60 days to have to register or go through a process to regain their privileges. Maybe you'd have to play for 20 hours to regain them, or do some special tasks to prevent somebody from logging on and being idle.

Hm, but it would also be horrible if you had just come out of inactivity and wanted to vote. You wouldn't even be able to vote for yourself if you decided to run.

People shouldn't run for something the moment they come out of inactivity =P That's... just silly.

DON'T DISS MY PLAN OF BECOMING MARSHALL! >:O

Hey, it's plausible! (Especially with certain guilds in dire need of people *cough*)

I can totally relate to that.

This happens a lot in Lusternia. It's blatant and unfair.

I think one of the IRE games has something in place to prevent it, or at least has made it against policy to do so.

*coughIxchilgalcough* It's okay, though, he really is good for the position.

I agree, though, this sort of thing is annoying.

Wouldn't it be a violation against seconds, which is shrubable? If people started getting all their characters shrubbed for voting after being inactive as a seconds infraction, it likely wouldn't happen much anymore.

It really has nothing to do with seconds...

Except, technically, (assuming they aren't voting for their own characters), it isn't a seconds violation. At most, the admin can dock credibility (again, assuming they aren't for voting themselves).

I'd say it's a seconds infraction since it would look rather suspicious when a character 'awakens', votes for someone, then goes back to sleep right after. It's using information that the character doesn't know themselves to learn of an election to then put their friend in a position with fiscal and decisive power over the guild/org. To me this would be more harmful then sending an alt gold or herbs, which only affects the alt and not a whole community.

If we had dormant or inactive members lose voting privileges, they could regain them by spending a minimum amount of time online, and also messaging a divine consulate or patron in that community to get added back. A divine could probably quickly check a character log and make sure they weren't just staying in one location AFK.

Or maybe say you automatically can't vote in the next 1-3 elections when you come back automatically. That's a little tougher on people but might be easier for the admin.

The only other way I thought of preventing voting fraud would be to have "term limits", make a character have a limit on how long he or she could hold a leadership position in a city or guild--either forever like the US President, or for a set period of time (You can lead a city for 6 real world months but unable to lead that one for 18 real-world months afterward). This would prevent a monopoly on people holding a community and creating a "power elite". However, I don't think it's a good idea because so few people make really good leaders and you might be hurting your community in the long run if limits are set.

Edit: To reply to Phred, I appreciate the sentiment, but I dont think any of those are the answer. We should NOT have divine involvement in this - even if we did, that person could just fake it, still. Losing a number of elections is bad as well. What happens if you come back without elections for a long time? Then, even though you are active, you are unable to vote.



To avoid just being a nay-sayer, heres my idea. If you pass a certain threshold of inactivity, then you have a certain ammount of time that you must remain active before you can vote again. Fill in numbers as seen fit. However, if you ever go inactive before filling that active-time-requirement, the counter gets reset.

Kharaen, it's not just seconds that are a problem. Hypothetically speaking, a real old player who doesn't play the game anymore--for instance (off the top of my head) a well known player like Bricuru or Gwylifar or Ibaesha--could come back right now and instantly vote if an election was active, because he or she might know the other player on an OOC level and wants to help. That should not be allowed.

I think it should be hours-based. Or, another idea...let's say inactive characters start losing Karma, at 1-3% per week, to a max loss of 50%, and if you're inactive and want to regain voting privileges, you need to have karma at a certain level to vote, say 75%. This means that you couldn't "game" becoming active to vote by just staying idle for 10 hours in your manse, you'd have to go out and work to accomplish tasks and actually play the game. This would make it harder to game the vote. (And an Inactive character probably wouldn't care if they lost Karma if they came back after a year, since after that time nobody would be able to curse them).

Just thoughts.

Out of curiosity, how long do you have to be logged off to become "Inactive", anyway.

In my mind, metagaming is breaking seconds, which is what you just described. Using information your character shouldn't have to benefit someone because of an OOC acquaintance. Meh. It's why I'm happy I'm not GR3, I don't have to worry about voting.

My opinions on the matter are clear enough in the rants thread. I do not see any solution that isn't just as exploitable as the situation at present. Requiring someone to play for a certain length of time before the election disenfranchises those people who play extremely casually, and those who happen to be taking a brief break at the time.

An idea for a solution is to put some sort of weighting on votes based on how active the voter is, up to a set limit. Maybe someone who just logged in has one vote, but someone who has been logged in 24/7 all IC year has two. Maybe even three. Basically, don't weight them much, but weight them at least a tiny bit to disfavour the inactive voters without disenfranchising the wrong people.

Right, so for the next Harbinger election Daedalion and Arel's votes would be worth three votes, Kaervas and maybe one or two others would be worth two votes, and everyone else's would be worth one. Since our average election/referendum has about 10 voters, I don't think this would be very fair. All of the suggestions here so far really don't sound fair at all.

How would you define time of inactivity? a week, a month, a day?

What's wrong with wanting more trees?