No Photos of Stats, No vote.

[Lycaon]

I dont understand? Why would you vote legit for someone's character if there isn't any proof? It doesnt take long to put photos on your profile. Just take a screenshot of your skills. Anyone can look up what skills needs to be leveled to become a lvl 81, then lie about which skills he has used. Also a link to your steam's profile page would help to legitmize the hours you spent. Hell, even just a link to such a thing will get my vote.

[Tom]

Hi Lycaon,

The reason why we allow characters to be voted as legitimate/illegitimate, even if they do not have photos of their stats uploaded to their profiles, is for a few reasons.

First, we realize that not everyone is going to want to upload screenshots of their character's stats. Some people may simply want to share their characters with the community without putting too much extra effort into it, and we recognize this reality and try to facilitate the usage of this site by as many people as possible. However, we came to the conclusion a while ago that it is generally pretty straight-forward to tell if a character's stats are legitimate or not, and that photos of the stats, while nice, are not really necessary to tell if stats are really being fudged or not. The reason the system exists as it does today is for a reason — it came in response to problems that we were having with illegitimate character stats being posted and the community having no way to ensure that such illegitimate characters were taken down from the leaderboards, other than by reporting it to us and waiting for us to take care of it. We therefore implemented the legitimacy voting system to make it a community-driven, automated process to take clearly illegitimate characters out of the leaderboards at the community's discretion (the way it should be, as far as we can see). Sure, people can lie about their stats by checking to see how high they can make their stats while still keeping them within reason, thus winning them legitimacy votes for fudged stats, but this likely happens so infrequently that it's an acceptable pitfall of the system. As I always like to say, no system is perfect, and the character legitimacy voting system in place on The Elder Stats is certainly no exception. It wasn't meant to be a panacea for the issue of illegitimate character stats being posted on the site and showing up on the leaderboards. Rather, it was intended to assuage the problem as much as possible to make The Elder Stats a more enjoyable and useful site for the majority of users who use it legitimately and respectfully.

The legitimacy voting system is really in place for two reasons. For one, it's there to give visitors viewing the character's profile insight into what others have thought about the character's stats, so that if that visitor feels that the stats seem fishy or questionable, he/she can look at what other people think about the character's stats via the legitimacy ratings, and can therefore feel confirmed in their suspicions, or realize that maybe they were being too critical. Second, the system is there so that, if a character gets enough "illegitimate" votes relative to its number of "legitimate" votes, then the character can be automatically hidden from the leaderboards, since if enough people think that a character's stats are illegitimate, it's quite likely that they are. This enables the leaderboards to retain a good deal of their integrity via an automatic system that listens to the users' opinions, without requiring us to get involved every time there's an illegitimate character that may need to be taken down from the leaderboards. In summation, the system is there to improve the problem of illegitimate character stats being posted on the site and in the leaderboards, but to be honest, people will do as they please, and there is no way to ensure that everything is perfectly legitimate in every scenario. And if a character author is firm enough in their stance that their character's stats are really legitimate, even after being challenged heavily, then what are the odds that someone would go through this much trouble to stick to their guns so long for something that's actually false? I'm sure there are people out there who might still do this, but it's highly uncommon and is not a large enough issue to justify the modification of the entire system to make it more strict simply to prevent such situations.

I hope that this helped to clear up your concerns a bit. Like I've said, the system isn't perfect, but we've tried to make it as efficient and effective as possible, while still allowing our users to easily enjoy the site.

[Lycaon]

I see..

Well, I can see how it isn't a problem for the masses. But I just can't really trust the people who are on the top of the leaderboards without some kind of proof of their stats. Their stats might have been legit in the begining, however there really isn't anything stopping them from just fudging their stats here and there to stay at the top. Now this is just speculation, and there might not actually be anyone doing so, but we can't be sure.

While I understand no system is perfect. You still have to take into account the flaws that effect a feature of this site; do you not? I'm not going to question someone with a lvl 10, but I am going to question the top say 10 or 20. It isn't really fair when someone whose taken the time to provide proof, and is just a few points behind first, second, or twentieth in the boards; but is being shafted by someone who hasn't provided proof and is falsely tweaking his stats just to stay ahead. I can't imagine it to be difficult to edit your profile, and just add a 0 once in a while.

Now I'm sure most of the members are honorable enough not to attempt such a thing, and it is mostly a concern to those who are actually in the top 10 or 20, but when you start segregating the leaderboards into brackets (something people will do regardless), that pool gets smaller and smaller, and that one bad egg's actions begins to have more weight.

Maybe this is one of the flaws you have mentioned, or Im missing some technique the website uses to keep this from happening. I'm still new to this site, and open to the fact that I might have jumped the gun in thinking proof is required to get a positive legit votes.

Now my suggestion would be to add an easier filtering system for newer members. One that will highlight suspecious behavior. That way they can learn which stats are commonly lied about, and learn what stats boost your ranking.

Also recently I have given someone a negitive legit vote, and provided reason for it. That person's responds was to give my profile a negative legit. Even though I have provided screenshots of all my stats. So for now on, Im going to take sabotage into account as well.

[JoeCapricorn]

I just use this site as a way to share my characters, not necessarily to use them in competition with others. I use an uncapper, which removes the skill progression limit of 100, and is how I am able to get my characters past level 81.

I do have screenshots of both characters' stat sheets in game, because constantly alt+tabbing out of Skyrim contributes to the instability of Skyrim. I'll post them later, perhaps.

For Euronymous, the Fortify Restoration glitch was used. Kind of a funny story really, I just wanted to see how it worked by using alchemy to create fortify restoration potions, then reequipping apparel that had fortify alchemy and fortify smithing. Eventually I got potions that were crazy powerful, and allowed me to level Alchemy to 300 really quickly. I then used one of those potions and the equipment resulted was so powerful it leveled Smithing to 300 since it is also a skill that takes into account the item's value for skill progression. I then decided I didn't want to use such ridiculously overpowered equipment, so I sold it. In doing so, since I sold an item that was worth several million gold to a vendor who only had around 1000 gold, I still got the skill credit for selling a million gold item and that caused Speech to go up to 300.

Sorlia was created from the start to use no exploits, since I did notice that the game got significantly easier when playing Euronymous soon after that whole Fortify Restoration shtick. But he is an evil character who does not play fair, he will shoot a guard in both knees with his bow if he has to. He also kills all witnesses, and is a vampire. So in a way he really really sucks... a lot of blood that is. Sorlia is a good character, she got to such a high level only because I play her far more often recently than Euronymous. Since she is a no fast-travel character, and since I am all ADHD when playing Skyrim, you'll notice she has over 7000 wings plucked. Considering that I have a mod that adds many many different kinds of butterflies and moths (83Willows 101 bugs!) and I just love wandering around Whiterun hold, Eastmarch or The Rift to catch bugs, that's probably how that stat got so high.

The site has a lot of neat features that I will use for a new character, such as a character journal. I might create a new character to celebrate 1000 total hours played. In that regard, I still have 102 hours to go.

[Alarra]

I use this site mostly to share my characters as well. I'm particularly proud of Alarra, as she was my first-ever Elder Scrolls character and I've been through a lot with her, and it just happens that the amount of time I've played with her resulted in her having stats good enough to place her near the top.

Why did I not post any stats until I "completed" her? For the simple fact that it's tedious and they change all the time anyway, so even if I did post some, they'd become outdated in a day or two. It takes me roughly half an hour to update all my stats and add my daily journal entry without dealing with pictures of stats as well. Consider, also, not just personal preference, but the technical aspects - people who are consoles rather than PC will have more difficulty obtaining and uploading screenshots, for example, and then you've also got the case of people whose characters' save files have become unplayable and they can't get screenshots anymore and have just left their character up from when they last played.

As for your question "Why would you vote someone legitimate without proof", it's because, based on my own experiences with my own character, I genuinely think their stats are plausible. If someone posts something that looks real to me, I'll mark it legit - if I got my character that high in that amount of time without cheating, why couldn't they? I don't see the point of having a negative viewpoint and assume that everyone's lying unless they prove otherwise.
And then again you've got the issue of what constitutes as "proof". I've got one of the most well-documented characters on the site, but I've gotten 3 "not legit" votes in the past week or two alone, despite having screenshots of me wearing armor from all sorts of questlines and having weeks' worth of journal entries saying what I've done (with pictures!) and what skills I've leveled each day. I may not have had screenshots of my stats up yet, but if that's not enough proof for people that I'm not cheating - and apparently it's not, for the three that rated me "not legit" - I really don't know what to say.

[baratron]

I vote people's stats as legit if they're people I actually know and trust. I know a lot of really pedantic game players who would either never cheat, or would state clearly that they had. If I don't know the player, I'm not going to vote on their stats. Simple as that, really.

I would be willing to provide screenshots of my stats if asked, but do remember that it's non-trivial to do so if you're not playing on PC. It's also non-trivial to do so in Skyrim, since the way that stats are displayed in-game, you don't ever see all of the skill values at once on the same screen.

[Torapa]

I would love to post screenshots of stats but I play on an xbox 360 so thats not an option.

[Tom]

I would love to post screenshots of stats but I play on an xbox 360 so thats not an option.

I've found that most modern smartphones can take pretty good pictures of TV screens, so you could try simply taking a photo of the stats screen with your phone (if you have a decent camera on it) and then you could upload those photos to the site.