Why are admins saying low post count peeps have no vote

[Tekki]

I have unlocked this topic because a similar one complaining about the election process has been started and merged them both.

Though STILL didn't answer any of the questions asked by Hansbrough. And I'm fairly sure he'd think his thread was sufficiently different that it should not have been merged - certainly not by you Robe, merely because of your involvement in it.

But let's look at some of the discrepancies shall we?

The Ombudsman is chosen by the Forum Community to represent their best interest and is required to provide unbiased opinion and fair judgments on matters of conflict between Forum Users and the Moderators.

Those were part of the rules. It says nothing about the ingame status of people.

It talks about the FORUM COMMUNITY.

Now this is obviously where the question about post count has come into it, though I can understand that the issue of post count was not brought into the original rules so it didn't make a difference... supposedly.

This is from the announcement of the result:

Zeratul and I reviewed every vote using the following screening criteria:
~ Shared IPs voting for same candidate
~ Incorrect ID and Username (two dislexic posts were allowed)
~ Uknown Forum accounts on vacation mode
~ Unknown Forum accounts with low post counts (under 100) or low forum activity that had less 20m Army or new game IDs.

The last one is particularly questionable. Low forum activity, linked to army and how did you decide what was a new game ID?

How did you also decide what an unknown forum account was? This is very subjective. And it appears post count did suddenly come into it. Surprise surprise. Funny how some rules are given more strength than others.

Manetheron may be the best ombudsman ever but there is simply too many questions about how he won at the moment for his position to be taken seriously

[Robe]

The last one is particularly questionable. Low forum activity, linked to army and how did you decide what was a new game ID?

I am not sure why people are confused with the Awards and Ombudsman Voting Processes because they are two entirely different events.

If you understand the objective then the controls make perfect sense.
We were focused on reducing the risk of people voting twice.

The risk controls we used in the Awards would not have been sufficient in the Ombudsman election to manage this risk.

The rules of the election process and votes are here

Since many players have more the one forum account we decided to mandate for the first time the requirement of posting exact in game ID and Names to register an official vote. This was only way we could effecitvely audit the votes.

Our prime objective was to ensure that only one player voted once.

We recognise that no election process if fool proof in real life or these forums. However we beleive we were able to effectively reduce the risk of players voting more than once (by intent or error).

[Zeratul]

sorry to all if you feel the way it was chosen was wrong... if the rules had been changed to take forum activity better into account, it would have required that voting be restarted, and that would have caused a LOT of uproar...

as for why it was 20m army, that is the number robe chose to use to define active enough ingame. no solution is perfect, and noone is infallible... the truth is that those few votes that did not follow the rules set up, did little to affect the election in the long run...

oh, and forum activity is quite likely to be taken much more into account in future votings...

[Clarkey]

[quote="GunZ":**Filtered**]This is a message to JASON...


Get control of your mods/admins or those of us that support this game will bail ...I am damn close. I am sick and tired of the crap that is going on.[/quote:**Filtered**]
Please remember that not all (hardly any) of us Mods were involved in the process whatsoever. I myself completely disagree with the outcome purely based on the obvious rigging of votes by other players (not Robe or Zeratul).

[zeekomkommer]

everyone settle down a lill and stop making big acusations around here.

arkangle: it has been stated that acounts who are ingame active but not forum active have been alawed to vote. thus your problem is solved

to everyone who complains about this: give your arguments wich can actualy be used. we are all still learning from this election and some things will not happen again next time around.

if there are any other complains about this all just remember to do it in a proper respectfull maner. most of the time your complain is being handled by someone who is not @ fault in this thus does not deserve your anger.

and everyone please note that all steps have been taken and are currently being taken to doublecheck everything by the entire admin crew. there were several complains filed:

- about the closing time by me wich is being handled
- about the voiding of some votes votes by the voided voters themself

if you are mad about how the voting ended the you first have to ask youself if you voted in the first place. and why others didn't vote on the person you wanted to win

[thorslittleworld]

I have unlocked this topic because a similar one complaining about the election process has been started and merged them both.

Though STILL didn't answer any of the questions asked by Hansbrough. And I'm fairly sure he'd think his thread was sufficiently different that it should not have been merged - certainly not by you Robe, merely because of your involvement in it.

But let's look at some of the discrepancies shall we?

The Ombudsman is chosen by the Forum Community to represent their best interest and is required to provide unbiased opinion and fair judgments on matters of conflict between Forum Users and the Moderators.

Those were part of the rules. It says nothing about the ingame status of people.

It talks about the FORUM COMMUNITY.

Now this is obviously where the question about post count has come into it, though I can understand that the issue of post count was not brought into the original rules so it didn't make a difference... supposedly.

This is from the announcement of the result:

Zeratul and I reviewed every vote using the following screening criteria:
~ Shared IPs voting for same candidate
~ Incorrect ID and Username (two dislexic posts were allowed)
~ Uknown Forum accounts on vacation mode
~ Unknown Forum accounts with low post counts (under 100) or low forum activity that had less 20m Army or new game IDs.

The last one is particularly questionable. Low forum activity, linked to army and how did you decide what was a new game ID?

How did you also decide what an unknown forum account was? This is very subjective. And it appears post count did suddenly come into it. Surprise surprise. Funny how some rules are given more strength than others.

Manetheron may be the best ombudsman ever but there is simply too many questions about how he won at the moment for his position to be taken seriously

I am going to look at each and every posted vote, I will take note of the game id given and the name, and get back to this post sometime later today

I am some what disagreable with the army size requirement of 20m decided by Robe as it is contentious, and discriminitory to those whom have just started, ascended using all resources, been at war xx time lifer suicided all there lifers and end up with very low armies. Dont forget those who sold up and restarted ect ect ect.

[Robe]

I am some what disagreable with the army size requirement of 20m decided by Robe as it is contentious, and discriminitory to those whom have just started, ascended using all resources, been at war xx time lifer suicided all there lifers and end up with very low armies. Dont forget those who sold up and restarted ect ect ect.

Votes that were voided are tansparently marked in orange so its pretty hard to miss

In the end we didnt void anyone for having a small army, that was simply one of many screening criteria used to review all votes.

The 7 Voided votes were pretty black and white.
ID and names that did not match
No ID posted.
Voting twice
Shared IP voting for same person that didnt respond to our request for clarification after 3 days.

We even allowed for two dislexic voters who got their ID wrong

[Nimras]

everyone settle down a lill and stop making big acusations around here.

arkangle: it has been stated that acounts who are ingame active but not forum active have been alawed to vote. thus your problem is solved

to everyone who complains about this: give your arguments wich can actualy be used. we are all still learning from this election and some things will not happen again next time around.

if there are any other complains about this all just remember to do it in a proper respectfull maner. most of the time your complain is being handled by someone who is not @ fault in this thus does not deserve your anger.

and everyone please note that all steps have been taken and are currently being taken to doublecheck everything by the entire admin crew. there were several complains filed:

- about the closing time by me wich is being handled
- about the voiding of some votes votes by the voided voters themself

if you are mad about how the voting ended the you first have to ask youself if you voted in the first place. and why others didn't vote on the person you wanted to win

Listen to ZEEK even tho i saw ZEEK should have won as i voted for him and therefore wanted him to win lol, i agree with ZEEK on his post.

Calm down I do not believe Robe nor Zeratul has done anything not by the standard they set for this voting and how.

Only thing that could happen is if a vote was miscalced or missed as its easy to do when sitting for hours. Hence why they where 2 to do the counting.

I say all take a deep breath and then come with some constructive post which contains the proof to back up your claims.

If you wanna calc the votes even recheck everyone knowing you do not have the powers they do do so, if you want someone else to do it who has powers that is neutral find one, heck i would gladly if it makes anyone happy if the admins will grant me the power to check everything do it for you, so everyone knows it was done fairly.

Its annoying if the one you wanted to win did not but thats life.

Nimras

[thorslittleworld]

I have just finished............ the votes are as follows and do not take into consideration voidness or those I see as not correctly posted..

Remember the rule made in yellow highlight

"Players may only make one vote each.
Your must use your exact game user name and ID to lodge an official vote"

...................Original votes....after initial inspection...........duplicates
.........................................incorect respons in post.........deduction

Antz....................0004...............0003..........................0003
Dundee................0015...............0014..........................0014
~FreeSpirit~.........0019...............0016..........................0016
Highwayman.........0003...............0003...........................0003
Manetheren..........0076...............0073...........................0073
MEZZANINE..........0001...............0001...........................0001
myworld...............0000...............0000..........................0000
Nimras.................0002...............0002..........................0002
Semper................0007...............0007..........................0007
Tetrismonkey........0002...............0002..........................0002
Vortexal Assassin...0000...............0000..........................0000
zeekomkommer......0068...............0058..........................0056

clear leader is Manetheren with 73 posted votes correctly posted
Zeekomkommer has 56 votes

after taking the above into consideration, I chose to only check the details of these 2 particular applicants as there would be no point checking the others.

details after checking id's with names posted, as the rules say, exact user name and id

71 for Manetheren

56 for Zeekomkommer

I cant deal with IP addresses as I dont have access to that sort of info but it seems quite clear the winner was Manetheren

What is to be learnt here

1) if you want to support you have to post your vote and correctly
2) Clearer guidlines need to be put into place, such as a proformer post

ie

ingame name xxxxx
ingame id xxxxx


vote for xxxxx

3) and most importantly the deadline should be displayed at the begining with any outages added on, a break page could be displayed explainin any increase of times maybe could be displayed closer to the time, or maybe a global pm sent to each forum account


Congratulations Manetheren.

I would say to any person who thinks there is something not right here, it would be hard to close the gap enough to expect / call for a revote

[Clarkey]

I would say to any person who thinks there is something not right here, it would be hard to close the gap enough to expect / call for a revote

There's something not right here...........

warman
Total posts: 2
Voted: 17th Feb 2009 06:00am
Previous post before vote: 21st Sep 2007 11:37pm

[DaDigi]

I'm conducting a review. Spreadsheets and graphs. It will be finished soon enough.

[Juliette]

I'm conducting a review. Spreadsheets and graphs. It will be finished soon enough.

Wow. Spreadsheets and graphs.
*bows to techGod*
Good luck, Digi.

[Nimras]

I'm conducting a review. Spreadsheets and graphs. It will be finished soon enough.

Wow. Spreadsheets and graphs.
*bows to techGod*
Good luck, Digi.

Yeh and i promised him to triple check it kidding.

[Norbe]

I have been playing nearly four years and I am so disgusted with recent events ...unbanning obvious cheats because they '' contribute'' ... favoritism for certain individuals, unleashed partisanship in votes ...it is getting to be damned comical .

I'm sorry I have to reply to this GunZ. You and me both know that these "recent events" have been going on for years. A lot of people who get caught 'cheating' end up unbanned for various reasons. Remember when Jason found out that STI/Jake and CO were all logging into each others accounts, clearly breaking the rules and banned them? Then reversed that a week or so later? When that happened I didnt complain, because they are/were great players in their own right. Same reason that you shouldn't complain now. As the saying goes, what goes around comes around.

And as far as the ombudsman voting goes, it is hard for people to get high post counts on here. I've been very active on these forums for almost three years now, and I only have 400 odd posts. Most of my posts are in the market section and thus get deleted. A long time ago I actually had to go through spamming the entire forum for a couple of days to meet one of these stupid post count rules.

HOWEVER

Clarkey is right. Someone who has 2 posts and hasn't posted in two years isn't an active forum user. So the chances of him/her contacting the ombudsman for the correct reasons is uhrm... zero. Perhaps there is a middle ground here. 50 posts excludes a lot of the lower-end users, particulary if its newer users. In future I think there needs to be a comination of factors. Maybe 20-25 posts minimum, account must be held for 2 months or more... a few more things could probably be thrown in. The key is to get a fair cross-section of the community WITHOUT excluding people.

thats my 2.cents.

~Norbe.

[Robe]

I recognised several well known players with extremely low post counts.

That is why forum activity is a much more meaningful screening criteria than post count.

Also there are many players who regulary read forums but rarely post.