EA Staff (Retired)A few positives. Good to see a cash handout (made the free land expansion) and got 4 stars this time. Not totally convinced the winner was that much better but voting is subjective so I can’t complain at 4. [now with file uploaded for my Green Valley]
as for the voting, I am a software engineer of 25 years experience and the latter half working in quality assurance of software / data analysis. When putting together a voting system, you can think about the ideal solution (people give 5 stars to the best, 3 to average ones etc). However, you need to think about how it can be abused also (with or without cheating). On a ‘rate each city’ format, if I want to win I give everyone else 0 stars an hope someone gives mine non-zero. A ‘pick the best’ approach forces the voter to positively score a city. Still doesn’t stop people voting for the worst one so the competition is reduced but all that means is a rubbish one wins. How you then operate the ‘pick the best’ is up for grabs ... pick from 2, pick from 5, use elimination so only the better ones go through to the next round ... you could use a forced distribution (show 6 and rate them 0 to 5 stars) but that means one from 6 rubbish entries gets 5! At least with pick the best, rubbish v rubbish will randomly win some and lose some so won’t get more than 2.5 stars.
ideally you would hope the developers would use an approach proven elsewhere. They tried this with the war leagues which appear to use the ELO system (chess world rankings amongst many others). They have had to adjust the ELO implementation because of mistakes they made but that’s a whole other thread. Hopefully for design challenges they have taken a proven ‘off the shelf’ solution and implemented correctly, as well as using defensive coding to make it hack proof.
