You Can Now Disable Legitimacy Voting on your Characters

[Tom]

Hello everyone,

It has come to our attention that some members have become frustrated by the fact that some of their characters have been receiving a high volume of "No" votes via our Legitimacy Ratings system. It seems that some characters that have high stats, despite their authors' assertions of their legitimacy, have been marked as illegitimate by the community for receiving too many negative votes. This has understandably caused these characters' authors to become quite upset at what they deem an unjust abuse of the system by anonymous voters who are not even required to specify a reason as to why they choose to downvote other characters.

To ensure that everyone enjoys their experience to the fullest on The Elder Stats, we are now allowing character authors to disable the Legitimacy voting system for any of their characters, if they wish to do so. To disable Legitimacy voting on your character, go to your character's profile, click the "Edit Profile" button, and on the left side of the page you will see an "Additional Settings" area. Find the setting labeled "Allow 'Legit' Voting" and set it to No, then save the changes. This will disable the Legitimacy voting system for your character so that abuse of the system by voters can no longer affect the perception of your character. Please only disable the Legitimacy voting system on your character if the system is being abused by voters.

However, we must remember why this Legitimacy Ratings system was implemented in the first place — to allow the community a simple way to ensure that the Leaderboards remain free of characters who have stacked their profiles with illegitimate stats. With this in mind, we have therefore decided to completely remove any characters from the Leaderboards who have had Legitimacy voting turned off on their profiles. If you choose to disable the Legitimacy voting system for any of your characters, please note that those characters will be automatically removed from the Leaderboards as long as voting is disabled on their profiles. This must be done to ensure that the Leaderboards remain fair and competitive.

Thanks for reading, and we hope that this change to the system will ease the frustrations of some of our members who have found it to be unfair in the past.

[Korock]

Another work around for this would be to require people who vote on Legitimacy of other players to have to do some sort of "input" function. Either with a "Captcha" to make sure they're not bots, or to make them sign-up/sign-in to be able to vote, or even make voters have to leave a short comment on the profile with their vote of Yes or No. People who care about voting and are actually giving out characters justified votes, are the kind of people who wouldn't mind adding a comment with their vote. Just a simple "Good job in only 45 hours of play!" or "Damn, thats a lot of murders!" for Yes votes, And if someone wants to vote No on a characters Legitimacy, a lot of us wouldn't mind saying a short "Theres no way, you've killed 24,000 people in 20 hours of play" or something along those lines.

Just further ideas Tom to make the Leader boards more viable.

Because frankly, the A$$ holes running around dropping NO votes constantly, just to be trolls will be stopped by being required to make a comment for their vote to count at least 80% of the time. That's how trolls are.

[Tom]

Thanks for the feedback, Korock.

I made another update to the Legitimacy system just yesterday, actually, which requires viewers to login (or sign-up, if they aren't yet members) to the site before they can vote on a character's legitimacy. I think this will stop a lot of the people who vote without just reason, such as trolls who aren't even members here and don't want to be bothered with signing-up to vote because they don't actually care that much. So, one of your suggestions has very recently been implemented.

The idea of requiring voters to provide a short reasoning as to why they voted yes or no has been brought up a few times before, and I think it's a good idea. I'll see what can be done in the near future on that.

[Korock]

Thanks for the reply Tom, its fantastic to see your on going interest in the site and your on going interest in making the site fun and easy to use!