Top Voters [April]

As there must have been some sort of technical mishap that made the post I wrote here some 20 hours ago just disappear, I am gonna repost it as I think it to be of major importance to many dedicated players. Here comes my original post:

I have held this back for quite some time now, partly because I just wasn’t sure about the internal workings of votes, but this month’s listing is a plain slap in the face and it saddens me quite a bit that it is this negative experience that made me register an account on forums.

I cannot understand this month’s top list, I cannot understand most previous ones. And most of all, I am absolutely baffled that no one else seems to have questions about it. Am I too much of a simpleton to get the hang of voting? Does everyone else just get it and the logic behind it and is totally fine with it?

Last time I checked, April had 30 days. Thirty. Given that we have three vote sites, that makes 90 possible votes. Maths to the rescue! So, as you can guess, I am a bit confused about the top rank only having 85 votes, and even more so about the apparent fact that neither my pre-commenters nor anybody else seem to feel any consternation about that.

But confusion aside, what really makes me irate is that I am without the faintest trace of a doubt completely certain that I did not in fact (as opposed to the findings in the list above) vote 84 times, nor did I vote 85 times. I voted exactly 90 times. Ninety. Nine-oh. I had multiple alarms set for every single day and every single day I went through the irksome procedure of voting at all three sites. I even stayed up the whole night until 6 a.m. (in my timezone) on the brink of the 29th to the 30th of April to make sure I was among the first to get the 90th vote. And boy, was I glad when the table on vote2, after I put down my 90th vote at quite exactly 04:01 a.m. UTC, showed my name at the uttermost top with 30 votes and everybody else below with 29. $25 gift certificate – here I come!

Or so I thought. Little did I know that the top voters list, as far as I can tell, is a total fabrication. When I caught sight of it just now, it utterly perplexed and infuriated me. Is this the gratitude you show loyal players who vote thrice every day and, by doing so, advertize your server to the world and help you run your business? Am I supposed to be content and quiet, because at least I got a $10 certificate? Am I really the only one noticing the upsetting inacceptable irregularities around top votes? And by the way – and this is less important, but it is something I have not been able to wrap my head around even in the past: Why is it that your enumeration suggests already ordered rankings, but the timestamps you cite are completely topsy-turvy?

Wanna keep your players and voters? Then I strongly suggest you make this mess transparent and fair. Just my disappointed two cents.​

Well, any thoughts on that? Any answers? Any fellow players frustrated with the top voters process? Anyone else out there who feels they did not get the reward they earned by voting meticuliously all month long?

 

April had a few days when votifier was down, thus they did not count.

 

That might be. But Votifier certainly isn’t the only way to view votes, it is just – as the name cleary says – a vote notification tool to give players vote rewards right after they voted. It is not a reliable source for fair vote counts. Every server has an account they can log into at each vote site. These sites keep track of the votes, as can be clearly seen by the tables they show on their sites. If the vote sites are capable of counting to 30, so should be this server. Don’t blame Votifier.

 

If they used this to count the votes for this system, I think that it is fair to blame Votifier.

Noobcrew owns multiple servers besides just this one, and the staff team is busy as well, so using a system to get the votes automatically counted is not a bad idea especially considering that this is monthly across multiple servers.

I think you should be happy with the 10 dollars. Top voters don't have to get rewards. The rewards you are complaining about aren't even required, this is just the owner being nice. He could not give rewards at all. Had there been some bigger mistake that wasn't very obviously something not working, like players votes actually being wrong, I could understand you being upset but I feel like at this point you are just nitpicking over someones kindness.

 

I think you’re completely missing the point. And I get the impression your evaluation of the situation might be strongly biased by (presumably) years of playing and voting and getting gift certificates to an extent where you probably don’t even know on what to spend your gift certificate balance. Try remembering how you felt before and after you got your first gift certificate – in the early game it can have a great impact. But, as I said, that is just my impression, I might be wrong.

Whoa, you really make me look almost evil. Spoilt and pretentious. Well of course, nobody has to get rewards. Give out rewards, don’t give out rewards – owner’s choice. But promising rewards and then not handing them out or only partially, that’s not the nicest thing to do, am I right? And let’s be blunt for a minute: While Noobcrew might be a totally nice guy (I suppose, never met him, but I’m grateful for this server of his), this is not about niceness, this is a business model. I’ll give you virtual recompense that I can create out of nowhere for you helping me generate a bit more of very real income one could call it. No problem with that, but be true to your word then. A deal’s a deal. And it is documented quite thoroughly in the Vote Rules. And on a more personal note, I makes me feel deceived and betrayed, having upheld my end of the bargain.

While I fully understand the workload and burden of multiple servers, you’re actually contributing to my point here. Be it because of overload or something else, the current method of counting votes is obviously error-prone and (again on a personal note) feels overwhelmingly unjust and incomprehensibly nebulous. And how hard can it be to log into three different accounts instead of relying on Votifier? I bet even now one could log into all three and still access April’s votes and easily see, for instance, me having 30 votes each.

Again, this is not about niceness or the feeling of entitlement or some technical difficulties or any of that. This is about fairness and transparency. Neither do I see here. And not only on last month’s list. Just pick any top voters list... there is something fundametally flawed with each one. This is a systemic issue. It confuses and frustrates me. But judging by the lack of support for my plead, I guess I might be the only one feeling this way.

I beg to differ. If Votifier proves to be unreliable, don’t blame Votifier, don’t use Votifier for the monthly rankings, otherwise people will feel cheated.

 

you do realize the $10 is only for the skyblock shop right?

Its not a $10 visa, subway, starbucks, amazon, etc. giftcard. In all honesty I've been on the leaderboard and got $15 giftcards but i never use them bc they're all useless to me unless someone pays me a lot of grass. It can be great if you wanna buy expansion or gift a rank but its nothing much.

Mind you I have over $50 in a variety of gift cards irl and that's much better than a skyblock giftcard LmfAo

since the top votes had 85 max and April being 30 days. Server did have to be closed off to everyone (except for developers and owners) for at least 1 day so it likely would've messed up the vote count from all the sites as there were issues. I would say 84-87 would've been the expected range given the outage and the constant restarting and issues when it was first released. Unfortunately, your math failed to account for the downtime.

ur 2 cents made 0 cents (pun intended). To be fair you aren't the first person to complain about it as we had a similar issue but with players who were near the top 10 and that already has been addressed a while back. ​

 

Tbh, I've never understood how it worked, but that's to far in my list of things to worry about in my life. I simply know that I'm voting at 8pm (EST) everyday and end up in the top voters list almost every month. I've even been the first to win once a few hours in front of everyone. How is that possible? No idea

Now tell me the times totally makes sense lol I've never understood that part either...

 

I have actually never won top voters, I have never been close to winning even in the years I have attempted to win. I have no desire to win though as I don't have a need for GCs currently, I'm fine with letting other people (appreciative people..) win in my place instead of attempting to win for myself

In the thread you linked, I would really like to point your attention to two things in it.
"Vote totals are tallied based on the logs of actual votes received from the voting sites between midnight UTC on the first of the month, and 23:59:59 UTC on the last day of the month"
"We do not control the voting sites and are not responsible for any votes that do not reach us. While occasional network glitches happen and votes are sometimes lost, these incidents have an equal chance of affecting all participants. We can only count votes we actually receive and have no way to know when we don't receive a vote. For these reasons, we are unable to make adjustments to make up for votes we did not receive. Please understand that if we made manual adjustments to the vote totals, we would be rightly accused of rigging the results."

Both of these quotes out of the thread you linked and read yourself actually describe and explain what you are currently upset about. The way they are logged is through the Votifier system which is what is used to determine the top voters, so if the Votifier system was down on certain days then the votes wouldn't be counted. Now, could they technically go in and count all of these themselves? Yes, but that would lead us to the second point where they say that they can't because it would count as rigging. On top of the Votifier working, the server was down for over 14 hours one day which would make the vote count a bit short anyways, so even if the Votifier counted every vote correctly thing month you still wouldn't have received 90.

Great, it sounds easy when you do it for one month, for one server. Could you imagine doing it every month, on all of his servers, and having to also find a way to view past the top 10 that the website displays to correctly give out the rest of the rewards as well? And everything has the chance to make errors, that is just part of life. Nothing or no one is perfect. And with everything that has to be done behind this, like monitoring the server, generating the codes, distributing them, all while actually dealing with more serious issues, is overwhelming and unfair to put it all onto one person. The system they used works fine and has worked fine, if a few votes are not counted I really don't think it is the end of the world.

And I'm pretty sure they adjust the maximum total for each gift card, so if they do you will actually be receiving a 15-dollar gc and not a 10 one. While I do get your feelings and why you are upset, try looking at it from the POV of the fact that you could've got nothing, you could've been told since you weren't in the top 10 then you don't get a GC. In my opinion, life is better and easier by focusing on the brighter side of things, especially insignificant things like quite frankly this gift card, and gives you a better outlook.

 

ah yes 6 out of the top 10 being the same person isn't suspicious at all

 

It was a mistake in the automated vote tallying system. Crew was contacted, and no extra rewards were received.