chugach mtn boy wrote:Alpinist wrote:Hooboy. Are we really opening this can of worms again? The voting system has been discussed ad nauseum in the past. I was a big proponent of changing it when SP2 was first launched but it may be too late now since all of the current votes are based on a binary scale (10 or nothing).
The formula that should have been implemented is based on a weighted average 10 point scale.
((V1*P1)+(V2*P2)+(V3*P3)) / (P1+P2+P3) = S
V1, V2, V3 = Votes from 3 different people
P1, P2, P3 = Power ranking of the 3 people
S = the object's Score
In this example, only 3 people voted. Simply extend the formula for any number of people.
This would yield the results that people are expecting to see. Scores would be based on a 10 point grading scale similar to the way schools grade. If an object had a score of 88 and you voted 9, the score would always increase slightly based on your Power Ranking. Similarly, if you voted 8 on that object, the Score would always decrease. There are no quirky exceptions. The calculation would always work as expected.
The weighted average method gives members with a higher Power Ranking a greater ability to influence the Score.
This is a nice starting point, but it would mean that most objects on SP would be rated 100. If one person voted 10/10 and nobody else voted, that object would go straight to 100, same as an item with 96 votes of 10, and ahead of an item with 95 10 votes and one 9 vote.
The one thing that is
good about the current system, and that ought to be preserved when it is reformed, is the concept of a "par" score set well below 100. Right now, par is 85, and you need some 10 votes to progress above that; you need a lot of 10 votes to get into the 90s.
You could keep par at 85 and create a built-in gravity that pulls items toward par unless gravity is overcome by votes. Using Alpinist's example, it would work mathematically like this (the example also tweaks one other aspect of Alpinist's formula so as to produce scores on a scale of 100, which I believe was his intent):
((10*V1*P1)+(10*V2*P2)+(10*V3*P3)+85000) / (P1+P2+P3 + 1000) = S
V1, V2, V3 = Votes from 3 different people
P1, P2, P3 = Power ranking of the 3 people
S = the object's Score
With the above example, if 3 people with power of 100 each vote, respectively, 10, 9, and 10, you end up with a score of 87.69. If they all vote 10, the score is 88.46. If they vote 10,9, 10 but one of the "10" voters is Dow and has power of 1000, the score goes to 92.72 (even though one of the 3 votes was a "9").
You can increase the "par gravity" by increasing the automatic add-on to the numerator and denominator. The system would probably work best with somewhat stronger gravity than in the above example--maybe I'd go with +850,000 in the numerator and +10,000 in the denominator. But 9 would still be a positive vote in such a system.
If you want 8's and 7's to be (marginally) positive votes, par needs to be lowered to less than 70. This is easily done. For example, the automatic add-on in the numerator could be 600,000 and the automatic add-on in the denominator 10,000, and, mission accomplished: 7-10 would be positive votes to varying degrees, at least initially; 6 would be neutral; and 1-5 would be negative. Note, however, that a 7 vote on an item that had
already progressed to a high score (such as 90) would have a marginally downward effect, although much less than it currently has.
[Edited for clarity]