Policy Review Policy Review - Poll Voting vs. Bold Voting

<@darkie> k i approve

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We should all be proud of the current progress we have achieved as a project. However, it seems that though we have many who are willing to share their idea, many of these ones do not even bother trying out the newly made Pokemon.

The main problem that I, along with others, have noticed is that elements like the stats and movepools are being decided by many who do not even battle in CAP. This is a problem considering that the only ones affected by the choices of CAP are the ones who battle with these Pokemon. The solution? Poll voting needs to be replaced by bold voting in the areas such as the: stats, attacking moves, counters and the complete movepool sections. The rest, to an extent, can be justified with a simple poll, but sections like these require crucial attention.

Poll voting is a great way of polling the general mass but the fact that many do not bother to take part of the CAP server is very disappointing and become of this bias develops. It has become obvious that there are those who vote for a specific option simply because a certain user has more influence, or a higher position than the rest of the other candidates. This leads to an ineffectual style of polling since, like mentioned over and over again, the only ones who ultimately are affected by this project are the ones who take the effort to get onto CAP and battle. So in the end, results are skewed and people who are affected are left unhappy.

Thus, I propose that we, instead of poll voting, should bold vote the specific areas mentioned above so that those who are truly affected by this will get the say instead of random people who randomly vote.

Discuss!

Definitely approve, I'd like to see this in all non-flavor topics. As determined by the bisecting the process PR thread.

There's definitely a large amount of users who vote without caring. I'd like to see at least some thought before a vote is counted. There is also a lot of regulars who vote for flavor reasons, or just because it's the first thing that came into their head. This is also not correct. If you don't want to have to formulate an opinion for a topic, just don't vote. Skipping a couple topics won't be a problem as long as when you do submit, there's sound reasoning, and quality arguments.

I also foresee I agree with ______. I'd at least hope if you do this, there's at least a reason behind it. A 2-3 sentence summary would be fine, or bolding important parts of their argument or something.

While CAP has a lot of quality users, the are a lot of new-comers too. If they have an argument, but you see it as somewhat weak, at least everyone is trying. We are still trying to incorporate everyone in CAP. Just reason your arguments. I'm hoping for very little validation, if any at all.

I am so happy that so many things I supported in the PR Threads pre-CAP6 are being brought up now! I fully support this for the reasons you stated, plus, by having bold votes, if people type reasonings and such in there post, it is easier to see why people are voting, leading to more informed decisions.

Actually may I propose something similar? I would like to see those catagories not necessarily voted on by respected members but submissions be made by them. That way there shouldn't be any really "bad" submissions, and while I agree there are probably a few people that vote based on user, I don't think it's an overwhelming issue

Definitely. This will prevent one click voting, and will actually give some structured thought on decisions as opposed to normal polls where voting is just a click away. Whereas flavor polls usually encourage one click voting due to the fact that it is opinionated, competitive voting needs to be taken seriously by members who know what they are doing.

I don't think bold voting will make make any significant difference in the long run. While it is true that bold voting takes more effort than poll voting, that is not saying very much. In bold voting threads, people can quickly skim through the OP to determine the voting choices, and from there, your vote is simply two clicks away. I am not making assumptions here, I know for a fact that a good amount of voters in even the bold voting threads are guilty of not really paying attention to the process/nor going on the server to actually playtest the new pokemon, which is the problem that you believe bold voting would address.

If you want to completely eliminate the "unqualified voters", then you would need to force them to back up their votes with good reasoning. However, according to the forum rules:

All posts should demonstrate a good working knowledge of the CAP project and the competitive pokemon metagame. Less experienced users are welcome to vote in CAP polls, but please refrain from contributing to discussions, until you have a firm grasp on how the project works and how the competitive metagame is played. Read the reference stickies and lurk first.

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tennisace made a proposal in the past to create a "voter registration" system, which would put restrictions as to who could vote, but the reason this idea was rejected goes back to an age old issue that continues to affect the CAP project to this day. I'd rather not get into it since this thread is about bold voting, but I don't think it will solve the problem.

This is not a way to filter out the new users from the experienced users at all. It is just to make users put more thought into why they are voting for what they are voting instead of simply clicking a little button then ok. Most people who want to vote do so for a reason. This just eliminates the possibility that people are voting for specific users or just voting in general or any other excuse like bandwagoning.

Not really, people can bandwagon by parroting the good reasoning. All it takes is two keystrokes to post a few lines of reasoning!

You've got to keep in mind that not everyone can come up with their own unique answer, but at least they are giving a legit reason rather than some of the few things mentioned in my last post.

You're missing my point. You don't need to put any reasoning behind bold voting either. tennisace is absolutely correct about bandwagoning too. This is actually a bigger problem in bold voting threads.

I still don't see why this would be any worse than what it already is. You can't just copy what they've said. You should have at least two sentences of your own creation telling us why your vote is valid. Even making people post makes sure they have reasoning behind their argument.

Why is what we already have any better.

billymills said:

I still don't see why this would be any worse than what it already is. You can't just copy what they've said. You should have at least two sentences of your own creation telling us why your vote is valid. Even making people post makes sure they have reasoning behind their argument.

Why is what we already have any better.

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Yeah, you can copy exactly what they've said. It's happened multiple times in previous threads like the original Garchomp test. And own creation is a pretty loose guideline, change a few words here and there, paraphrase a bit, and wham, same idea different sentences. I never said the way we're doing it is better, it just gets the same result for less work.

I'm agreeing with tennis and Bass here. I don't think that mandatory bold voting fixes most of the issues that it's trying to here. Reasoning's easy to parrot, and you don't need to do much more than give a quick once-over on the OP to actually understand what you're voting for.

I'm not really sure if people are actually biased because one side has a member with a loftier spot (like, say, Doug). Often times I see high-spot users on the losing side... and likewise on the winning. The most I can tell is that there's not really much of a connection so no problem is fixed anyways.

We do not "protect" the project by making voting increasingly difficult. That just discourages people from joining in the project. We already have numerous procedures to make sure that the slate contains nothing but valid options. If we have options that would be harmful if they win -- THEN THE TL IS NOT DOING THEIR JOB. I have not seen this to be the case.

Once we get a slate of options, it really doesn't matter which one wins, because they are all competitively legitimate. If they aren't -- then it should not be on the slate. This is a fundamental premise of every step of the CAP process, and it's there for a reason. By the time we get to polls, we should not be worried about noobs "ruining our project" -- which is a criticism I hear a lot from the experienced members of this team.

I can't believe that on one hand, we have a thread up asking new members to get involved and come on the server. And then over in this thread, we act like newcomers are a liability. Be careful what you wish for guys. If you really want a little project with 10-15 active informed CAP geeks all making pokemon together with no real participation from the outside world -- you just might get it.

I realize the thrust of this thread is not meant to exclude anyone. But, I've noticed a serious undertone from experienced CAP members in various threads that newcomers are simply a big pain in the ass across the entire project. I do not share that opinion, and I don't like rules proposals that discourage people from participating.

I know everyone has these visions of people randomly wandering into the CAP forum, closing their eyes and clicking a vote and then moving on to some other part of Smogon. I doubt that is true. Even if it is -- SO WHAT? It's not like any option in the poll is BAD.

Bold voting sucks. It makes long uninteresting threads with miles of bland uninteresting posts. No one can see what option is winning. Maybe some of you think that's a good thing. Well it isn't. Having a poll at the top of an OP with a close race between two top options, making people constantly keep checking back to see who is going to win -- that's a good thing. It's interesting, fun, and exciting. Not some boring-ass thread full of a bunch of bold votes with a discussion so thin, that people can't scroll to the bottom fast enough. Or better yet, ignore the whole fucking thing and just wait for something cool like the art thread to come along.

Once again, for those of you that say, "Fine, let the drive-by voters wait for flavor votes" -- that is the attitude of someone that wants to have a private little community of their 10 closest e-friends and make "kewl" pokemon on their own little never-visited battle server.

This is a large community project. It's a large community for a reason. And that isn't because we make every thread as uninviting to newcomers as possible. I frequently use the phrase, "Come join the fun!" when advertising the CAP project on the Smogon news page. Proposals like this unintentionally undermine my efforts to keep the CAP project accessible and interesting to everyone.

We need more click polls, not less.

I fail to see how using the bold voting system we've used in the past will force the voters to be significantly more informed. How is it any harder to press the reply button and type a few words compared to voting in a clicky vote? Nothing, well nothing significant, both tasks are very easy for someone who wants to make a quick vote. It doesn't deter anyone from voting at all.

Now, I've seen people suggest that by bold voting we also force people to put reasons in their post. Well that just invites a lot of copy/pasting. Anyone even remotely smart and with the slightest ability to be deceptive doesn't even have to be honest about why they are voting! They just go out and copy the reason that will get the most supporters and be publicly acceptable. I've seen people suggest that people come up with "creative reasoning" or something like that, which means that the TL has to judge which reasoning is sound and which is not. Such a method where the polltaker decides whether a vote is valid based on reasoning has already been discussed in the nonCaP policy review. The end result was that it's not objective enough, there's too much leeway as to what's acceptable and what's not. It doesn't accurately gauge everyone's intentions due to dishonesty. We already have the TL judge what is competitive and what is not, all leftover options are good options, horrible ones are culled. Doing this proposal just puts an unnescessary extra layer on top of that while making everyone put more effort in their posts. Culling obviously horrible options is fine, but culling individual votes is simply unnescessary and a questionable procedure.

I'd like to say I agree with Doug on this one. It's no fun looking back on a bold vote after you have posted, until the TL closes the thread and puts up the final tally. I'll check back every so often on the click polls, to make sure what I voted for is winning.

Basically, my opinion on this has changed by participating in a more casual way. This is coming from the person who originally made the large push towards bold voting. Now, with the discussion threads separate from the voting threads, there's not much reason to force bold voting unless you want a weighted voting system. No one bothers to read the bold vote threads, because there is no discussion in them at all (this will not prevent me from writing at least a sentence after my vote anyways, old habits die hard).

Actually, some people, like me read them.

Don't think everyone has shot attention spans.

Furthermore, didn't the discussion and reasoning happen in the discussion thread?

Serenity said:

The main problem that I, along with others, have noticed is that elements like the stats and movepools are being decided by many who do not even battle in CAP. This is a problem considering that the only ones affected by the choices of CAP are the ones who battle with these Pokemon.

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I kinda agree with this, and hence I propose the somewhat controversial but obvious thing: competitive aspects of the CAP project should be suggested only by people that play on the CAP ladder on a consistent basis.

Yeah, I know that this basically puts an end to my own stats and movepool submissions, but I'm willing to do this for the good of CAP if so should be done.

Noooo X-Act your stat and movepool submissions are frequently genius. While I understand the reasoning in favour of limiting stat and movepool submissions to CAP Ladder users, I believe that overall the effect would be detrimental.

Firstly, this limit would be a major barrier to anyone new getting involved in stat and movepool submissions. Most people who care about CAP, Don't care enough to ladder furiously to obtain the right to submit a stat spread/movepool. Some members may be informed but not have time to ladder that often. Some members may be quite well informed without ever going on the server (e.g. X-Act!) and some new members might have gained a decent grasp of the CAP metagame/what it takes to make a good submission without having time to increase their ladder rating.

The CAP ladder is currently relatively little used - the low numbers of users on the server generally mean it is easier to challenge individuals than wait several minutes for someone else to go on ladder. Implementing this proposal would force people to use the ladder and i'm not sure whether that many members would enjoy being coerced to find battles in this way as a default.

I realise that is slightly off-topic so I'll focus on the main discussion now - Poll Voting is definitely part of what makes CAP fun in my eyes. Several people have mentioned reasons why Boll Voting is kind of boring and does not encourage participation so I won't go into that here.

Poll Voting is a different story - just having a current tally of the votes can be very stimulating. An example was the Primary Type Poll for Fidgit where the votes for Poison and Electric were tied or less than 5 votes apart for almost the duration of the poll. This inspired alot of in depth discussion, drew in Alot of new voters and was altogether a perfect example of why I'm a CAP addict.

Yes it doesn't take much thought to vote in a clicky poll but as long as the discussion threads and posts in the voting threads are kept focused on competitive issues and a high standard of reasoning is maintained, one would assume these would guide public opinion (and drive-by voters) in the right direction. As DJD has said, there really is no Wrong direction if all options on a poll are competitively viable.

I think that Whatever we do, as long as CAP is a popular part of Smogon, people will always find ways to contribute to competitive aspects of the project without a great deal of knowledge of the CAP metagame. This is something we have to accept - it's a by-product of CAP's popularity.
The best we can do is try to ensure that only viable options make it to a poll and only solid competitive reasoning is used when posting in the Competitive track of the CAP project.

The effect of the Bisecting the Process PR thread will hopefully be quite positive in encouraging users to think again before posting inane comments in Competitive threads. An outlet for everyone's inner fanboy is still retained in the Flavour threads so hopefully this change should be enough of an improvement to reduce the bias and skewed votes mentioned by the OP.

Agreeing with pretty much everything Doug/tennis/Bass/Cap'n/Hyra said.

Drive by voters are not necessarily less informed than others, I myself often do a drive by vote if it looks like one option already has the win of it I don't have a massively strong opinion ether way. Bold votes are useful for what they do (allow polls with a large number of options) but clicky polls are much more user friendly which encourages participation and make the TL's job more easy and simple. And then there is the bandwaggoning thing..

Reasoning based voting may seem kinda like a good idea, but its hideously impractical. It would make the TL's job far harder, hugely discourage people from joining in, be extremely prone to TL's (or whoever is counting the votes) bias, and probably not make a better final product. Lets not, ok?

And X-Act, don't stop making movepools/stat spreads. Maybe playing a bit more on the server to improve your experence on the CaP meta would help, but honestly yours are consistantly good.

Conclusion:

No changes will be made to the polling guidelines in the current Process Guide.