EA Staff (Retired)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.
