I think this is a pretty sweet system. It also opens up some fun role play for people to have real "political power". You may have other people coming to you trying to sway your opinion, because you have so much influence in the guild. That's an aspect I always thought would be cool to have.

So not only does this help the rigging of elections that goes on, but I think it adds in some very fun role play potential.

The problem I see is that in-game time doesn't correlate with activity with the guild.

Consider player A, who plays something like 20 hours a week, most of it bashing his way away towards demigod, but who doesn't have any guild positions, doesn't usually fight, and isn't involved in the guild.

Now consider player B, who is active for 30 minutes on weekdays (Not continuously) as long as nothing needs his attention and occasionally 2 - 4 hours over the weekend to bash and spend time around, but who's a guild secretary.

Can you justify player A's vote being worth more than player B?

On that line of thought, what do you think of making vote weight publicly visible in HONOURS?

I would be against that, since it ties in with my comment about bribery.

Bribery isn't a bad thing, IMO.

I don't think the vote weighting of a person needs to be displayed as a figure on HONOURS, but something like 'He/She has little political influence' for someone with 1-4 and 'He/She has great political influence' for someone with 8-10 might be fun.

This 1) Gives a very easy measure of how much certain leaders log on, and 2) Isn't actually true-- someone who has a 5 but is a CL has a lot more political influence than a CR1 who plays 12 hours a day for a month.

1) That's not necessarily a bad thing, if you ask me. If a leader is inactive, you might as well replace them.

2) The wording can change. 'He/She has X influence in elections'?

I disagree that in-game time doesn't correlate with activity. Honestly, how effective is a secretary that logs in 2.5-4.5 hours per week? I think you'll find the respected, active members of the guild are around much more frequently. Anyway, we are not trying to put a value on the "worth" of a player. The simple fact is that those who are logged in more often are those who are engaged in Lusternia. Whether they bash or help newbies or simply are there chatting, they are participating within the game and just by that fact they are enriching Lusternia. So, yes, those who log in more hours will have a greater voice in elections. They are the ones, after all, who are playing the game! Is this ideal or absolutely fair? Probably not. Can you come up with theoretical scenarios to point out how it may not be fair in certain circumstances. I'm sure you can. Is there a better solution? I have yet to hear it, but you're welcome to offer suggestions.

Hmm my vote is worth less than 5, which I guess considering I've logged an average of 2-3 hours a week these past months makes sense. That's the only opinion I can think of for now...

There are better solutions. 10 is too large a range; it doesn't lead to fairer elections compared to, say, five. To the contrary, it turns elections into more of a crapshoot - Someone may win simply because he was liked by the people who bash a lot. This time of the year, you can win simply by being liked by the people who didn't travel for the holidays or went somewhere that didn't affect their level of activity! The scale should be the same, but cap at five or so. That way the majority of players have an equal vote, but inactive or marginally-active people have less valuable votes. Or keep the scale from 0 to 10, but normalise it so that at any given time the more active 50% of the active playerbase (I understand there is an older coded definition of "active," used for families if I recall correctly) is at 10 voting weight. Or simply make players who have been inactive unable to vote until they've been active regularly for a particular waiting period.

And "player A" as I described him would have, according to our friend basic mathematics, have spent 4.5 to 6.5 hours a week, not 2.5 to 4.5, assuming that is there is nothing that compels him to stay (This replicates my usage pattern in times I was less active - Log in, spend ten minutes asking people if they need me to be around for some reason, log off as soon as there are no unresolved affairs, plus a couple hours every week for remedial bashing). I would argue a player that does that but spends well over 50% of his time in-game dealing with other players is more engaged in the game (Or, rather, in the in-game community) than someone who spends five times as much time in game, but spends 90% of it bashing.

My issue here isn't with some people having less voting power than others; it's with some people getting more political power than is normal for a player for no reason other than spending a lot of time in-game, and the majority of people who clock such large hours are trying to bash to demi, forge stupidly good weapons, or cut bulk gems. When was the last time you saw someone log in for however long and spend two hours just chatting, or dealing with guild business? And how many people do that regularly? Some activities in-game are just more time-consuming, but it does not follow that people involved in those activities are more involved or invested than others. Again, normalising the scale so that the majority of players has the maximum voting power would solve that problem without removing the system's original purpose, which was to prevent elections being rushed by returning inactive people.

Thats the whole reason for it, I dont know bout otehr envoys but I had people complain about it..

The anti vote abuse in my slot can be removed from the envoy report tentative now too >.>

Actually, Arix, I think IC bribing is an excellent RP device.

There is a difference between bribing a character who is in the realms (an IC matter, as long as you don't approach them OOCly), and bribing a retired player to come back to his character to vote.

This is a nice solution to the problem of OOC rigging. Keep up the good work, guys!

I love the idea but i think people should have a max vote of only 3. 1 for inactive 2 for average 3 for over average any thoughts?

Hmmmm. Doesn't seem like a bad idea.

EDIT: Mine was at the 1-10 one. 1-3 wouldn't be bad, but whatever.

I prefer the 1-2-3, personally.

Nice idea.

While I agree with that in theory, technically, if the person has a higher CR rank, to use an analogy, they change from the "Congressional Branch" (the voters) to the "Executive Branch"--the President and the cabinets. I don't think if you're in a position of power you have a right to a higher-weighted vote. But I know you were aiming at how much they RP or contribute to the Lusternian culture.

I don't see why the scale should be reduced in weighting--reducing it to 1-2-3 might make it harder to calculate or make it more "black and white" and thus become more of a label.

And reducing it too much can still lead to masses of inactive people still pushing--the weight of the actives must be significantly higher than the weight of the inactives. If there are about 200 accounts for moondancers serenwilde and only 40 are active right now, you could have a situation where 160 ones out-do the 30 twos and the 10 threes.

Myself having three times the vote of, say, Darren (random dormant Ebonguard), is "significantly higher". The 'masses of inactive people' is low enough that people with a vote-weight of one will be easily outweighed by the twos and threes.

Not really, because of the following:

Using my example:



In short, you really want to keep the people who only log in to vote down enough. So that's why 1-10 might be better than 1-5 or 1-3.

Better to be safe than sorry.

Except your example has absolutely no basis in the realms of Lusternian-voting, because there are nowhere near 160 people who log on to influence elections (and never will be, unless Lusternia's player base grows about a hundred times).