I'm sorry, but aren't we gonna see Amoebas in the ES2? I doubt it is possible to invent more charming and attractive diplomatic faction. 

Are hints to the Endless allowed? 

If there's the possibility I also think a top 10 instead of a top 3 would work. From there their could be another around of voting for the top three, and have the contest proceed as normal.

Anyone else have issues with the early voting system?  Please read this post: https://www.games2gether.com/endless-space-2/contest/105-major-faction-creation-contest-game-design/proposition/20096-to-members-and-the-amplicrew-we-have-serious-concerns

I agree with the comments about how the voting works, I have seen it happen many times before with too many submissions and limited desire by voters to check out everything. In other forums I have always found it works best when the person choosing is the creator of the thread though this limits the voting idea here.

I would recommend for future time perhaps if the dev team sifted through submissions and chose a top 10 for people to vote on, then with a limited voting time after all submissions are in everyone gets a notification and a week let's say to vote and bam, the people choose and everything seems a bit more fair. The devs likely sift through here as it is to answer questions, moderate or for funsies and know what kind of feel they want for the game or what might not work balance or programming wise to help with narrowing things down.

Just my 2 cents.

pixelgoo wrote:

I'm sorry, but aren't we gonna see Amoebas in the ES2? I doubt it is possible to invent more charming and attractive diplomatic faction. 

I highly doubt we will see them as anything more than a Minor Faction if even that.

This contest forum is pretty much that thread.

Frogsquadron wrote:

To answer some specific points: scores are updated even after the fact, so if you link your steam account two days down the line, all threads where you voted will have their points adjusted. For the quest contest, that was unfortunate timing, but we couldn't force users to link their Steam account, we can just point to the feature over and over again. The points totals for everyone went down because of a problem with the way the Steam API responded to info requests, it made it seem like a lot more achievements had been unlocked on accounts than actually were, which gave most users a lot more points than they should have (that was for everyone). As a result, everybody's scores went down.

What if there was a dedicated thread that listed and linked all the current entries? Would that help?

I think so : the developers just don't want us to describe preexistent links between factions because there will be events about their meetings, but the Endless are dead, so...

To answer some specific points: scores are updated even after the fact, so if you link your steam account two days down the line, all threads where you voted will have their points adjusted. For the quest contest, that was unfortunate timing, but we couldn't force users to link their Steam account, we can just point to the feature over and over again. The points totals for everyone went down because of a problem with the way the Steam API responded to info requests, it made it seem like a lot more achievements had been unlocked on accounts than actually were, which gave most users a lot more points than they should have (that was for everyone). As a result, everybody's scores went down.

Frogsquadron wrote:

The Contests platform has some room for improvement (and up to a point I agree with what you're saying), but for the moment, we have to do with it. We're also aiming for something showing random entries to stop pushing entries that are already ahead, but it'll be a significant undertaking for our web team if we want to offer it at the same standard as the rest of our platform.

I'm really happy to hear that a feature like this is in plans though, this is great news

The Contests platform has some room for improvement (and up to a point I agree with what you're saying), but for the moment, we have to do with it. We're also aiming for something showing random entries to stop pushing entries that are already ahead, but it'll be a significant undertaking for our web team if we want to offer it at the same standard as the rest of our platform.

Hinin wrote:
I think that this is too late for this contest, but letting people upvote before everyone's propositions were ready is, I think, a mistake (a separation in two phases of one week would be better, to my humble view).
Another way to improve this kind of contest would be to make the g2ther score and the number of views invisible to non-dev members during the phase of vote : you can still vote for as many submission as you want, but you aren't caught by any particular submission, their title aside (shuffles at each visit, so no date on the threads, could even be another way to give everyone a chance to be read).

Both are valid suggestions imo. Another way to give a chance to people who post their thread and immediately get pushed to the second page (and never get exposure as a result) is to have a list with links to every entry, along with a super short (few words max) description of the linked faction. In future contests, such short description should be a requirement to make creating a list like that easier.

As it stand, it's gonna be a hassle to do so. IF I find enough time today, I might do it but I'm kinda busy so I can't make any promises

I think there were a lot of suggestion given during the last faction creation competition, I think they should be looked at again. There are some entries out there with only a 100 points that clearly deserve more.

But the core of the problem is that expecting everyone to have the willpower to go through so many pages of entries is a bit much. I myself have a hard time reading more than a page a day cos I stop paying attention after a while

Hinin wrote:

Frogsquadron wrote:

Talross wrote:

It seems like the threads that are up the longest are, on average, going to have more votes. Is this slant going to be considered when the votes are tallied after the deadline? I'd rather take my time and aim for quality, but at the same time I'm encouraged to rush. 

I'm not sure there is a causation link, as much as a correlation (submissions that are popular attracting discussion). As such and because it would be a nightmare to factor it in a way that makes sense, we don't weigh submission time or number of comments when it comes to popularity.

In that case, I think you should tell clearly to everyone that you can upvote as many threads as they want (by editing the presentation thread instead of specifying it in comments), because I think that most people vote for one thread, and it can create a bandwagon effect. 

Not only what Hinin said, but it's likely that a number of voters will step into the middle of this event, vote, and leave. Their opinions are only given for submissions that have been submitted before their visit; they won't even see later entries. Maybe they would mean to come back, but not, or maybe they're just being careless. They potentially miss out on voting for something they would have liked more.

Unless you assume that everyone who votes early will come back at the very end to consider newer entries as well, don't you have to admit it's skewed? It's like asking group 1, "Is your favorite flavor lemon, grapefruit, or kiwi?" while asking group 2, "Is your favorite flavor lemon, grapefruit, or kiwi, strawberry, apple or blueberry?" I think it's safe to say that unique foot traffic over 12 days is more than that of 2 days; therefore, it's incredibly likely that Group 1 is much bigger than Group 2. Yes, some of group 1 may come re-take their vote (moving to group 2 then), but we cannot know how many that is. It's still likely that more people voted as Group 1 than Group 2.

Well, that's their fault for not coming back, yeah? It's not just unfortunate for them; it's unfortunate for everyone. It still leaves room to deny an entry that may otherwise have won. It's hard to know exactly how much slant there will be. I can't see your web traffic, nor do I know how much of this traffic is "regular." Maybe the better ideas will be submitted sooner rather than later, in which case there would still be a slant, just one that isn't quite as unfortunate. 

Good point, I'll edit that in.

Pretty much.