Forum expert task - Reworking the CIA vote system.
The first thing to do was to observe the whole current voting system and identify the problems it has. This is crucial if one wants to come up with a system that works better than the current one.
After checking the weekly poll as well as some card ideas and consulting with the members of team Surf Ninjas, we came to the conclusion thatone big problem with the current voting system is that newer cards generally gain a lot of votes and older cards stay in the polls for a long time.
Another problem is that with the current voting options, it's the sheer amount of votes in a short voting period that decides which cards advance into the next level of the card idea compilation. We would like to eliminate this phenomenon as it reflects not the card quality in itself, but rather the amount of people voted in the voting period, which can be misleading. That is why we want to make the valuation of card ideas a continuous thing.
The idea is that with every card idea submitted, there is an option where everybody can give a score between 1 and 10 to the card in question. The appearance of such an option should be automatic, and coded into every topic that is submitted in the CIA section. Naturally, every member could only score an idea once.
The card curators could check the average score given to each idea as well as the number of members that voted. At regular intervals, the cards with the highest average would be moved up one level. There should be a minimum threshold of votes when a card is considered. (This is because after a certain amount, the extreme ends of the spectrum affect the average less and less, so the average score represents the quality of an idea better.)
Another interesting thing to notice is that the more experienced players can generally evaluate a card idea better. That is because playing the game (preferably at a competitive level) helps one understand the exact mechanics of a card, and helps them see how the idea would affect the metagame. This is why we would like to weight the votes of different members. We should be careful not to make the votes of new members insignificant since they could think that their votes won't make a difference.
The votes of the new members would be weighted with a multiplier of 1, the votes of Jr. and Sr. members with a multiplier of 1.2, and 1.5 for everyone above that, and finally weigh the votes of Council members with a multiplier of 2. These numbers (or something similar) shouldn't make anybody's vote much more significant than the other's, while still giving a little weight to more experienced players.
Card curators should monitor the CIA section regularly and take note of the cards with the highest averages. After the cards spend a certain amount of time at their current level, and their average has stayed consistently high, they should be considered for moving up a level. This process should be continuous, since the evaluating of the cards would be an ongoing process unlike the current system, where cards are evaluated periodically in the form of weekly polls. In the current system newer cards as well as cards whose makers can create "buzz" during the voting have some advantage.
Poll
