EA Staff (Retired)Design Challenge is one of the best game improvements ever. Unfortunately, in my opinion, the voting system need to be fixed.
After play a first round and read the other players experience I think I start understanding how the Design Challenge voting system works.
Basically, all players get 2.5 starts and few cities get into the voting rounds. This method could be a bit unfair with players that play hard.
How could you fix this? I think there are different ways to improve it.
1- Server could assign an internal score to each city. So, for example, a tree or a pond is one point, a home improvement 2 points, a building related with the event is 10 points... Only players with higher score will be introduced in the voting system.
2- Voting should be awarded with drawings points. So, voting should be equivalent to being voted.
3- There are three days to built and they are on weekend, but just one voting day on Monday. Voting should be extended during 4 days. As more votes, better results.
4- Server may ban certain kind of buildings. For example, if you are requested to make a Parish city, ban all the other residential or Christmas buildings.
5- Some weeks, once a month, the contest may request the higher population. The player with higher one wins, no need to voting. So, population players could enjoy it. High population require also to design layouts.
6- A simple system to make epic buildings should be added.
7- When building in Design Challenge, all buildings achieved should be available. It is so slow to remove buildings from main city to place them temporary.
Hope this helps.
The more I think on the voting system, the more it appears flawed. In simple terms, random rubbish against random rubbish, some you win, some you lose, average is win half = 2.5 stars. Good against good suffers the same problem. The only differentiator is good vs rubbish and that only works if people choose the good one. If you want your entry to win, you actually do better voting for the rubbish and hope others vote for yours. As for 5 stars, whomever came top is probably promoted to 5 regardless of how many stars they actually had. I am taking my 3 stars as I did far better than average even though 3 stars is an insult comparatively.
how to fix it? The previous post is onto something. There needs to be an algorithm sense check. My suggestion is look at the % of land covered. The higher % used, the better the score. HOWEVER, people do just fill their space with roads or landscape so the algorithm would need to look for that by asking what % of the ground is covered by roads, parks, buildings, landscape, services, education, entertainment etc. The more types of things used and the more even the spread the better.
Whether it is points per type of building or my suggestion it doesn’t matter. What that would do is give an indicative rating for each city ... and then we go into voting.
In the first round, those with a high indicative rating must be put against those with a low one. This should validate the automated assessments. After the first round of voting, 1/3 are eliminated : the 1/3 with the lowest win rate and these are assigned 0 to 1.5 stars. Any eliminated with a high indicative rating could be checked by a moderator and reinserted to the competition as applicable. In the second round, Eliminate half of what’s left (the next 1/3) and assign 2 to 3.5 stars. In the final round, there should be more of the best ones left and they compete for 4 to 5 stars.
the only downside of the elimination method is that it assumes 1/3 of entries are good, 1/3 are average and the rest rubbish. From what I saw, 70% rubbish, 25% average, 5% good. That means rubbish will get good points. However, as people realise they can do well with a little bit more than token effort, over time the standard of the competition should improve. If you can get 2.5 stars for no effort, guess what people will do?
As it stands I have no interest in using this feature. Mainly because to make a nice design you need lots of landscape items like rivers and trees. I have these in my Capital, but I'm not going to uproot these once a week to do a design in another region. This is also a disadvantage to those players that do not have these items at all.
What I'd like to see is that you have access to tons of temporary landscape items so that you can actually make something nice and also different to what your main city looks like. Maybe even a choice of another item like a castle or bridge, or some other landmark to be the main feature of the design.
