Warm greetings to you, Godville gods!
There are a lot of good news today. Let’s start with guild-related ones.
Guilds in Godville are self-sustaining amorphous substances and nobody really knows how they all work, which sometimes could be confusing. It’s time to bring a bit more order to this anarchy. From now on, the guild members will be able to elect a leader via newly created page. All prominent candidates can nominate themselves and fight for the mindshare of the fellow guildmates with mind-blowing campaigns in the Guild Council, forum topic, etc. It’s assumed that the leader will do things for the greater good of the guild, but in case he won’t, the guild members can always impeach him before the end of his term.
So, what a leader can do? In the ZPG spirit of Godville – probably not too much, but enough to bring a bit more order and fun to the guilds. A leader can set a daily topic for the Guild Council and setup a quick link to the guild’s forum topic to improve guild collaboration. For the high-ranked guilds the leaders will also be able to setup their own high-level guild rank and pick a known monster as a guild totem which will sure come in handy in the future. But enough words, let’s get to voting!
Meanwhile, the spirit of upcoming holidays is slowly but surely descending upon Godville. A pop-up settlement, also known as Laplandville, has opened their doors right next to the capital and began disrupting its business with bargain sales, overly generous traders, and extra efficient praying chapels. Heroes’ diaries are full of snow, and their sacks are full of gifts, while overcharged Holiday monsters are festively running around. Satan Clauses and Santa Clawses are also back in town and they look happy and quite tamable.
Happy holidays! Ho-ho-ho!
Ronners In my election I am able to vote for myself (Haven’t, though.) Not sure why you are unable to vote for yourself. Strange.
I just want to say as a larger guild with the winner needing 99 votes we are down to less than 1% with two days left for the leader to take the win. Large guilds can do this if they campaign properly. I like the idea of knowing who other people voted for and for the votes the public. People will get upset when they see their friends not voting for them but other people will be motivated to vote based on to others voted for. That is how popularity contests work. And that’s what this new position is
I love the new direction this feature is taking us. However Harvest Moon and some other guilds are so large that it’s taking a massive combined effort just to get 35% of our eligible members to vote at all. It’s good that with great effort will manage to have a leader, but really there’s no chance for competition here, because it will only work out if everyone sportingly agrees to back a single candidate. If there were 2 strong rival campaigns, the election would be pointless because we’d end up with no leader at all. I’d suggest the following amendments to the system:
1) allow members to vote for having no leader, in order to keep those guilds who do not want a leader (or are not content with any of the candidates) happy. If the “no leader” option gets the most votes, nobody wins the election
2) to be elected, a candidate should need a minimum of 35% of all votes that are actually cast, instead of 35% of all potential votes.
Amendment 2 would provide a fair opportunity for a competitive campaign, while amendment 1 would help ensure that an unwanted leader could not sneak themselves in with just a tiny handful of votes. If someone did manage to get in with only say, 10 votes, it would not matter because the rest of the voters could have easily stopped them but clearly did not care enough to do so.
I love this new addition to the game, and it could be great fun with just a little fine tuning!
If it has to be a % I’d say it should be a % of the active players in a guild. So e.g. if a player has reached cardinal but has not been logged in for a week or so he or she should not be counted towards the 35% that is needed. Maybe it is good to have a limit on the level to avoid that someone throws in several alts that just join a guild before an election.
The Almighty Frans a rank or Cardinal is required, so someone sending in several alts right before an election wouldn’t be an issue.
Actually, I don’t think the problem has so much to do with players who haven’t logged in for some time. I believe far more will not be bothered to vote because they play Godville as the mindless ZPG it is marketed as, and have little interest in the community or anything beyond the occasional glance in on their hero. Some of them will be old timers who used to be more active but have grown tired and gone into a bit of a slumber. More of them will be players who were always very casual and are content to remain that way.
On another note, if the minimum votes required continues to be based on a % of potential voters (as opposed to actual voters) I would suggest that 10% is about the right number, rather than 35%.
I agree with the suggestion to replace the percentage with 10% Either that, or keep it at 35%, but make that be the total number of votes required, rather than the percentage on one individual candidate.
I agree with the suggestion to replace the percentage with 10% Either that, or keep it at 35%, but make that be the total number of votes required, rather than the percentage on one individual candidate.
Looks like that last comment got sent twice. That’s a bug.
Agreed, Syrocko. We are currently a half a percent short and it is nerve-wracking. And this is supposed to be a ZPG. I don’t want to be pressuring people! The whole point of this game (for most players, I think) is ‘no pressure’! That’s why it’s the only game I play.
I honestly am just trying to do a good job of “playing the election mini-game” this first time, but I’m not sure we’ll really try in three months, after we get to see what these new features are, unless things are tweaked so it’s just easier to do this without having to exhort people, “get out the vote,” PM long-absent players, and so on. It’s probably not worth it. I certainly won’t be standing for election next time, but I’ll help out whoever in our guild does.
In Blue Feather, we have 17.5% who have voted. So I suppose we’re the test case for “not 35%”. Either way, it’ll be the same result, since SBFH is slated to win with the few votes that have been cast. Meanwhile, today’s earthly news? Aggressively demanding to be more popular… ;-)
Good luck to all, and congrats to Harvest Moon, for pulling it off!
We only got 19 people eligible for voting and only 5-6 actually voted. I’ve got 31.5% and I think that’s from the five actual active members…so what happens then?
Election notice: the leader has not been selected, because none of the candidates has received the required number of votes.
Gee, I wonder if we’re the only ones…
We have our answer….. it’s “Nomination Week” in Blue Feather once more. :-/
larger guilds can do this and smaller guilds can do this. It just requires a little bit of effort which in a zero player game is really harder than it appears. Harvest Moon and sowing Sun both got leaders. Thanks Godville for the new fun update.
Well, we managed it in the end. Just barely. Now if be interested to know what adjustments people would like to see before next time. Lower percentage, lower ranks allowed to vote, stuff like that. I really hated having to bug and poke members who were happily not participating. What I like about this game is that it allows people to play the way they want to—including not play at all.
But for the moment, I’d like to mention this:
Aside from the grammar error (“if his decisions don’t”), I was found the sexist language on all the elections announcements pretty glaring, because it has normally been avoided in Godville. Two of our three candidates were women. This can easily be fixed: “Guild members can impeach leaders if their decisions don’t…”
Sorry, this comes of being an English professor, perhaps. But I wouldn’t be surprised if women are a slight majority of players of this game.
Has anyone ever told you that you are Awesome Azzageddi!
Some thoughts on the new features, now that we have more inf oavailable.
I’m hoping the Guild Council Topic (GCT), once set, gets stickied to the top of guild chat for 24h, as that little Guildbot post can get scrolled off in an hour or less if guild chat starts churning.
Forum Topic (FT) – Making a link to the guild forum appear on our guild page is a cool new feature. Thanks!
High Level Rank (HLR) is not much use to our guild yet. We won’t even have one Prophet before October, let alone 5! Linking it to being a top 20 guild in Popularity is odd. Does that mean that if you drop out of the top 20 your HLR disappears?
Totem Monster™ – the requirement to be top 20 in Duelery will annoy some. Top 100 would be more reasonable. (Our guild is currently #3 in Duelery, 2300 points ahead of #4, so this concern is aimed at other, less aggressive guilds; bear in mind we are a guild of about 100 members and that the #1 and #2 in Duelery have over 500 members each.) #20 currently has a 1284 Rating. Most guilds struggle to add even a couple of hundred to their rating. Also, what if you select a totem and then drop out of the top 20? Position 100 currently has a Rating of just 718 and the effort required to move into and stay in the top 100 is much less than the effort required to stake out a stable spot in the top 20.
(I see that Guild Council Topic does get stickied. Good)
The God Of Monsters – I like those suggestions.
Iduna – aw, thanks!
I know I’ve said some negative things about these elections, and, well, I’m going to say more. But at the moment I do want to say that I know the Devs are trying their best to make fun new features for the game. I think they stumbled a bit here, but I do very much appreciate the effort, and I think this can be turned into something good with a few adjustments.