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I was saving this for the future (and I'll IDEA it later I think), but this is as good a place as any to put it: Aetolia should switch to a Ranked Choice Voting System. I think this would be really good for the game for a number of reasons, pretty much all of which are ennumerated better by others than I could, but here are the benefits:
- Completely eliminates salt caused by people who join elections just to be contrarian/make fun of people/as a meme.
- Would make individual player votes matter more, because instead of just picking one candidate and whoever gets the most wins, you get to actually list your preferences.
- Increases leader accountability to the players by making the risk of replacement much more feasible in multi-party races.
CPG Grey does a good job explaining the flaws in First Past the Post System (what Aetolia currently has) and why Ranked Choice is superior. This would still mean the person with the majority wins, but what decides that majority would be vastly different to what we have now. It'd also actually ENCOURAGE a diverse range of people running for elections, which I can only imagine is a good thing.To be clear on alt-abuse, though: we see a lot of information about votes automatically, including alts, shared computers, etc. It goes to discord, it goes to Gods channel, it does not sneak past us.
edit: Just processed "I do not mind the idea of coding different election processes for orgs to choose for in their democracy" and its implications, which are...problematic, honestly. If you institute choices for voting systems for things that are important like guilds and cities, what's going to happen is that the people in charge are just going to pick the system that's most favorable to them. I think this really should be something mechanical mandated from upstairs, since it's a borerline OOC/meta issue as well.
That's probably too much hassle though, tbh.
Elections in Aetolia are vitally important for the health of the playerbase. They are, of course, driven by Roleplay, but they aren't solely roleplay. Entire guilds have died and become uninteresting because a leader has become too entrenched. Voting really needs to be as equitable as possible and audited by tons of checks by the game staff (even if that's automated, it needs to be there), because a bad election/voting system can ruin entire chunks of the game for some people. Unlike in real life where you can have a popular uprising where people can enact their own systems, Aetolia is somewhat limited in what level of participation we have (think about how the war systems have all kinda been problematic because if one side wins, what might really happen IRL is the enemy org/city would be absorbed into an Empire or something, but that would literally ruin the game for dozens of people if that's how aet worked, so it operates within some sort of weirdly nebulous middle ground), and the people in charge of orgs have mechanical power over other people's play experience. Because of this, voting should be as fair as possible, controlled by the admin, and the thin OOC/IC tightrope it walks has to be carefully managed and looked over.
Also, I'm not entirely sure, but for some reason I thought vote weight got altered a while back so you COULDN'T simply idle to inflate your vote weight, and that it counted certain kinds of activity, not just simply being online.
Also saying someone is "butthurt" is really disrespectful and unhelpful.
I think both sides have their pros and cons. The current system allows the more active people to have a better say over ones who started playing again a week or two ago, which is a plus (saying as someone who falls into that very category). But leads into my next point... The con is that yeah it does 'reward' idling; just because someone plays a lot, doesn't mean they're 'active' in the org. From an RP perspective I think this is pretty bad.
Going more towards a 1:1 vote makes the voting fair (from a baseline at least) which is obviously a plus. In a democracy, nobody's vote should inherently be worth more than someone else's... Unfortunately, having come from Achaea, I've had enough experience with how awful this system is as well. It's horrible losing an election because a guild/city coincidentally became more active in the 2-3 weeks leading up to someone deciding to contest. Only for those characters to conveniently go back to being barely active once the election's over.
Both can be viewed as pretty terrible, both can be viewed as good. I think it's a hard thing to break from the admin side of things, though giving cities a choice on what system they use would probably be a good step.
That said, there's some interesting (to me) stuff to unpack here. Please treat this as more stream of consciousness and not me saying that anyone is wrong/right about anything.
If anyone were to ask me "Are players more or less involved if their leader is a hereditary monarch or a democratically elected council" I'm not sure that'd have a clearcut answer. I'm not even sure that better roleplayers make better city heads, a lot of "good" org leadership is not "X is a strong and charismatic leader!" but "X seems to have an ability to handle tedious minutiae and doesn't have a history of unicornsing everyone and stealing org credits/gold"
To me, what you're saying sounds like saying that cities and guilds are (partly/largely) OOC entities, and so should be treated "democratically" because they aren't character based but are systems that players interact with qua players and democracy is how we try to be fair to each other IRL.
If so, on one hand elections/votes of no confidence are (wholly or in part) OOC statements that the player in that position isn't fulfilling their role as a steward of this OOC organization (holding back newbies, hoarding guild credits, idk what else goes here)
But simultaneously, isn't wanting to be a strong city/guild/whatever leader a character aspect? Isn't wanting to have a hand in shaping the fabric of the Aetolian story every characters dream? And to do that with your closest friends and allies, fighting bravely against the forces of (red team/blue team)?
The urge toward fairness feels right and good and destroys dreams. Or something like that.
As far as drama goes, you're not missing anything and there really isn't any other than some bad faith posters trying to stir the pot and attach all criticisms of the current voting system to "drama/hurt feelings" so they can be summarily dismissed.
What I will comment upon, however, is that blanket statements regarding "remove x for y" is ignoring that y will have its own cons and requires a fair evaluation of the positives and negatives of both systems to see which outweigh the other or which can be mitigated to (hopefully) provide a more enriched system.
At the end of the day, voting is intended to be as fair as possible. There are arguments to be made how vote weight is equitable in that it rewards those who are active over those who are new or play less, be it less hours per week or less time overall. There is also an argument that 1:1 voting is far more equitable as everyone has an equal voice, therefore the mechanics are less abusable in a general sense. And while ranked choice is appealing on the outside and I like the general principles of it, it can also produce odd results and what could be considered 'unfair' winners. Look at the Oscars.
Bottom line being, every system of voting will be disadvantageous in the wrong situation. It sounds like in the recent elections that this may have been the case, but it may not have been. That does not mean we should not consider alternative methods, but it also doesn't mean that a system is immediately flawed based on the results, especially when we lack all the data - and we as players lack all the data.
Getting rid of vote weight means this can be abused much more easily. Seeing players suddenly log in and idle to inflate their vote weight can be issued and countered by the admins, at least.
Losing a weighted vote election might hurt, but it's much more preferable to alts/inactive players logging in suddenly or candidates ingratiating themselves to newbies. The players who are online more often presumably have more insight into the nature and qualifications of the candidates.
I see more opportunity for abuse if weighted votes are discarded.
Vote weight aims to reduce the influence individual players have even if they aren't actively engaged in the game, so people can't just call up all their friends who log in once a month to vote for them and win even if there is a smaller, but far more dedicated group who would prefer another candidate.
The problem seems to be in how vote weight is calculated, as it just shifts the goal posts from logging in once a month to being logged in for X hours every day even if they aren't actively engaging.
You'd have the same problems whether we have vote-weighted FPTP, vote-weighted ranked voting, or vote-weighted approval etc.
No election in the last month or two would have changed without vote weight. Anyone who won by points also won by popular vote. Vote weight tends to be a binary thing, it's either minimum or maximum, so it tends to average out to nbd. So, other than novel voting systems like Approval/Ranked, removing vote weight would change nothing except perception, so I'm inclined to keep it.