After returning from a three month hiatus, I find E2 has changed a good bit. Some of the new stuff seems contradictory, but what do I know. I've only been noding for five months. And lurking for three and a half years before that.
So you nerfed the XP bonus for using all your votes in a day? That's kinda weird. Why? Were people abusing this power somehow? How many users actually got this bonus anyway? For anyone that is employed or attending college, how many votes can you spend a day? 20? 30? 45? 60? I would be bored to tears just clicking 45 or 60 Vote buttons a day, even for a dump. C'mon, the XP bonus is there for the little guys. Those precious level 2'ers or 3'ers that come from a bright land full of rainbows and puppy dog tails. Hell, I remember being happy when the powers that be gave me votes for helping with a quest. I could finally show the smallest appreciation for the writeups I admired for years. The vote dump is a hook to give the little guys something else to do between writeups, check out some of the nodespace. They learn through observation. The XP bonus helps them get through the doors to bigger and better things. I thought XP was an imaginary number from an anonymous stranger; who cares if you get it from using all your votes?
Oh, look here, we get a lot more XP from chings and even posting the writeup. That kinda balances things out, I imagine. Except it doesn't. Not by a long shot. The newbies don't get a pat on the head for voting anymore. Sure, they still vote on some things but it's not the same. Users still want to read material that is interesting to them, but the XP bonus encouraged you to read things that were not always on your favorite topic. Sometimes this leads to wondrous curiosity.
But votes aren't just proof you read something! They were feedback! They told us how we were doing. You can't win someone's attention with just a headline in the New Writeups. Encouraging people to read the nodes, and vote, spread the love. Where has the love gone?
Get some people to compile a new nodegel visualization and look at the past week or two. How many fewer votes are they getting? Until I start seeing a few of these crop up, I can only talk about me, so here I go. Since my return, and the E2 changes, I have posted eight writeups, excluding what you're now reading. Thanks to the Honor Roll, when I left I needed 38 more writeups to get to level 4 and the power of chings. Eight writeups later, I need 39 more writeups to get to level 4. The sharp decline of voting is killing the Honor Roll system. Before you ask, my upvote-downvote ratio is the same as before, I just have half as many votes as I used to.
Now that road from level 2 to level 5, 6 or more got a lot longer. You've taken away the shiny gold star of participation and made advancement through the ranks that much more tedious. Do the gods forget the toil of the little people? Have their servants forgotten that they are not the only ones who encourage growth?
And why have we added insult to injury? The E2 Gift Shop is a great idea, if XP grew on trees. You destroy the simplest way of getting XP, then introduce a way to piss away XP like it's going out of style. A hundred XP for a C!? I have to sacrifice 20 writeups or 10 hard earned C!s to reward someone else? Not to mention the fact that you must be level 3 to buy a C! which is only a rung down the ladder from level 4 and free C!s in the first place.
Same goes for the Wheel of Surprise. Now I can blow the XP earned from a C! to . . . break even? What?
The icing on the cake is PiracyQuest 2007. A quest where your writeups will not be deleted, great. The floodgates have opened. Spending 7 C!s to reward someone who submitted a blank writeup? It wasn't that funny; just give it a C!. Then give the remaining C!s to the underlings. PiracyQuest was equivalent to whipping the horses furiously and then letting go of the reins.
You guys may not notice, but there are many more people active on E2 now than three months ago. Great, I'm happy for the community. I hope the newbies learn some stuff and stay around. I hope the elders enjoy the new generation. But don't cripple our user process in the name of. . . whatever the hell you call this.
Part of PiracyQuest 2007, nyah!
Look ma, no brains!
First of all, I'm impressed by the various responses from the gods. I appreciate your addressing my concerns. While I know E2 is not a BBS, I'd like to continue this discussion publicly between myself and the gods.
I am being slightly misunderstood as to what my complaints are about. I do not particularly care that the my personal XP bonus was removed for spending votes. I felt like the loss of the XP bonus was a loss of the incentive for people to vote. Voting is feedback! Trying to spend 20 votes a day forces you to seek out new material (if you skip logs and only vote when you feel something strongly deserves to be kicked up, or down, a notch). Even if it isn't a personal interest to you, a well written node is worth and upvote. We aren't blindly voting based on subject matter, remember?
As for the rate of XP kickback, or whatever you call it when you get +1 XP for voting, I searched for that material on E2 before posting my writeup. never found it, thanks for the numbers. But that still doesn't solve the problem of higher level users gaining truckloads of XP. I don't know the E2 code, but why not cap or cutoff the XP reward for dumping all your votes, based on level? Doesn't seem like that'd be a terrible effort and it would take away the greedy incentive of vote dumping while still encouraging other people to seek out material for voting. Consider "other people" to be those of lower levels who still benefit from the bonus of using all your votes. What if you cap the XP at 20? How many people are going to dump 100 or more votes a day for only 20 XP? It's an imaginary number, who cares? What's important is that the votes are feedback to the authors.
And a strong part of that feedback is the HONOR ROLL! That is why I said the road to higher levels has gotten longer. Good writeups are rewarded with upvotes and C!s. Writeups with great reputations help you move through the ranks via the Honor Roll. While you do need a certain amount of XP to advance through the ranks, it's harder to crank out nodes than gain XP (even now, with no vote dump bonus). Getting XP is not the problem; we want people to continue voting to help improve our users and reward our users. The voting bonus helps facilitate that feedback and reward system. My votes helped other people advance (a la Honor Roll) and improve their writeups(as a feedback tool). This is my biggest issue with the removal of the vote dump bonus.
Of course now I've gotten a lot more data on the issue, but I still want to ask the community at large, serfs and rulers, how this is working out. Can I get the vote numbers on the last six months of 2006? Will some people out there /msg me with their updated nodegel visualizations?
Update: I would actually like anyone with access to send me as many of the statistics as possible since mid 2006. I would really like to see the daily number of new writeups, daily votes, daily cools, daily users online. If there is anyway to pull up the E2 Stats from different days, please let me know. Check my homenode for additional contact info if you can contribute any of this information.