Jam Voting Changes

I've made a bunch of changes on the backend to how nominations and votes are counted. 

I'm not going to get into the details, but user votes aren't equal to 1 anymore. If they have just created their account, only played one game etc, they're worth less than 1. If they have played regularly for 2 years they are worth more than 1.

I am not happy about changing the goalposts like this, but it seemed like a change that was needed.

Lovely!

Interesting change. Seems more fair, sadly there are still some games that shouldn't be on the list.

edited:

I think you should also update the ingame browser

 I'm glad that GAMMA TEAM made it to the final. It’s certainly a radical decision. In any case, it’s better than what we had before. I hope there won’t be any such problems at the next game jam. Btw CATLINES now has 187 instead of 34

Good change

This is a very interesting rule change, especially considering that some participants actually brought new players into the game or brought back old ones, without using bots, thanks to their communities. Thanks for the Game Jam. Im glad about one thing - that a truly worthy game took first place. But as for the other games and the new rankings, where the top 5 is dominated by someone who carries “weight” in the community and brought back their old players from other modes (hello, braxnet) - that’s complete nonsense.

Congratulations, you just lost all your good developers, s$box seems like a shitty roblox copy now

👌Smart changes!! and the comment above mine 👆 is just noise...

good changes, would be nice to also push games that have few players but good ratings so far, would give every game a fair shot at getting nominations

lol at the guy with a score of 5 mad about this

be transparent

quick flex your user score

Seems like a good short term solution. Long term, I'm not confident.

I'm being a little dramatic but I suspect it'll introduce services that sell accounts whose vote has high value. This concept exists in Counter-Strike 2 where people purchase accounts that look "legit", or accounts that have high "trust factor".

A slightly less dramatic expectation is, gamejam participants will contact s&box players with high vote value. That's not even necessarily a bad thing, it just depends on if the developer is asking for them to play the game or if they're... incentivizing the player to nominate their game for a jam.

A more realistic expectation is, the popularity contest still exists, and it just shifts from a "global" popularity to a "s&box" popularity, which is what @enemyrau is talking about. I don't think this is a bad thing at all though. It encourages community involvement.

>  it'll introduce services that sell accounts whose vote has high value 

The Jam is almost over. Doubt next jam will have the same system

Valid point.

I just figure, the other topic mentions they're iterating until they find a system that works, so I may as well identify potential downsides of the current solution.

I think the system needs to partially incorporate judges on facepunch's side to act as a filter against gaming the system (but in a more elegant way than games being spontaneously demoted in the ranks or removed from the competition).
I know appointed judges may seem unfair at face value because its like "Why do these guys' tastes decide who gets to win?", but people should consider that having it as -only- public nominations without someone, who is trusted to be impartial, acting to cut through bullshit will always be an unfair system for the reasons the current nomination system had to be changed last minute. Although what they did is probably the best move at the moment, long term just further tweaking the weights of players' votes by some loyalty score isn't going to be a sufficient solution because brings up the problems people are arguing in the posts above.


If I was making it I would have the nomination phase separated into more stages:
split group public vote -> judge decision -> second public vote

So, when building ends, games could be randomly assigned to buckets where they compete against other games in the same bucket for public nomination votes. Each bucket would independently have their own set of games to be voted on. A subset of games in each bucket move on based on how many public votes they receive. The purpose of this is to cull the number of games for the next phase.

The next phase would be decided by the facepunch's judges. The judges would reason objectively which games are actually the best in this subset. This wouldn't just be an opinion based on the game's quality, their judgment would also consider suspicious behavior when choosing which games should advance. This prevents people who would attempt to game the system from advancing further while promoting good games that were decent enough to make the earlier cutoff but were otherwise buried the raw number of nominations.

At this point the games still remaining will be a significantly smaller punned and cultivated subset of games, so the next phase would be a reset public vote. The bucket-judge filter removes developers that went against the spirit of the gamejam from the system while simultaneously giving the playerbase a second chance to consider games they previously missed due to the high number of submissions.


If this system seems unfair just because it incorporates non-public decision, consider the older process was unfair. People were voting in ways that were not objective to the qualities of the game's themselves; having no judgement at all on facepunch's side is having impartial judges screwing with the system. More importantly, Gary just demonstrated he will exercise judgement less formally and less predictably than this. Because of the sudden change its expected going forward facepunch will somewhat be acting to determine winners at their own discretion; this is just more transparent.

Other things that could help would be... spreading out the prize pool or possibly having multiple categories for winners (eg best presentation, most innovative, etc). Maybe having honorable mentions decided by facepunch that do not win immediate monetary awards from the jam itself but could receive longer term promotion on s&box's browse features to at least boost their player counts and encourage further development would also be a good idea.
There are some options here. Even if it doesn't work, Gary can just change it. Uhh, I'm not being facetious by the way, even if this kind of idea doesn't work, he CAN just change it need be.

It's a step in the right direction but honestly doesn't feel like it does enough to address the fairness problem or that many game just aren't getting any players. Relying on devs to vote (the majority of the player base right now) seems faulty. I can't speak for everybody but I know I don't have enough bandwidth to play enough games long enough to give everyone a fair shot when I'm busy updating my game. The attention index is fundamentally skewed. Please consider introducing trusted judges, give each a couple hundred nomination points to distribute or something. Show their selections transparently.

I could probably argue that in an indirect way, that's what we're doing now. The more active community members and facepunch staff member votes are worth a LOT more points than someone who just got the game today and voted.. so they kind of are the judges.

That's fair, I can see that argument. The issue I still have with it is that regardless, many games that have value just won't get played. I was hoping to ensure every game got some amount of attention from an impartial third party. Maybe categorical winners with no cash prize, (instead front page exposure for some amount of time after the jam) could help alleviate the issue of many devs feeling abandoned by an empty community. Because the fact still remains that there's not enough people for everyone to get sufficient play time from a sufficient number of players.

Just leaving it like it is now would give the feel to newcomers that the community is hard to break into. If it's only that outsiders have significantly less voting power then they will be irritated and insulted by the system, feel helpless, and turn away. There needs to be some way to welcome new blood with each jam.

still feels like a speedrunning conestest where you only gotta post a screenshot of the time to enter, regardles of how you got it,

Even as a shit dev i can tell half these games where not made 'during' the jam.

Just got a feeling someone undeserving is about to walk away with 20k...

 Why are there two threads? Will repost this here:

 I will be honest, this change seemed nice at first, but it’s already completely turning into a fucking dogfest. I already got two people from the Discord privately telling me that they should vote for a specific game, because of my vote being worth something. And you can already see what’s happening. I don’t even want to name specific games, but you can literally look at games that had like 20 votes suddenly going up to hundreds of votes because they’re well established in the community and are asking their fellow peers to vote for them, which makes this jam a complet shitfest.

Games that had basically no players before are suddenly going up. Games that are objectively worse than others are sitting just as high in the ranking as before. So yeah, I agree it is better then what we had before, but man, this still fucking sucks. And seeing people with up to 30 votes is completely insane + the cut off for points being 2 years, when the game was just out for 6 months, makes devporn win and having newer accounts worth basically less than one vote also feels really fucking unfair, especially right now with the sale bringing in a ton of new players. Those are actual players. They’re coming in, playing the games, voting, participating, and their votes are basically worth fuck all because they just bought the game.

I really don’t think this is what Garry wanted to happen. The whole point was to stop people gaming the old system, not just move the problem somewhere else where established community members have a shitload of voting power and can tell all their friends and peers to vote for their game and honestly, I hope there’s still another short term change coming, because we already did one. The ice is broken. Another change shouldn’t be that fucking bad at this point. I’m growing so fucking slowly right now that, based on the current projections, I’ll probably be out of the game jam tomorrow, even with healthy player numbers and good nomination to player rate.

Also I don't want to name specific games because that’s not really the point, but when you can have a game go from 20 votes to hundreds because the developer is well established and can just ask their peers to vote for them, I don't think that’s fixing the problem. It’s just changing who gets to fucking abuse it. And I know Garry already said he isn’t happy about changing the goalposts, but the goalposts already moved. So honestly, I’d rather see another adjustment now than just leave a system in place that is already showing obvious problems. Just limit the max points frame to 6 months and limit points to 5 or something reasonable per user.

The thing that worries me more than this one jam is the future of the platform. I don’t really see my future on a platform if major changes like this can just happen in the middle of a competition without being communicated beforehand, especially when those changes directly affect people who were already winning under the previous system. Will probably move to Unity or Godot, it feels a lot less shitty managed than this. (I know I mentioned Unity, but I really do think that learning and deving in Unity is the better choice rn, even with the breach of trust that happend before.) 

I dont get this new system its just the old players helping old players.... I have talked with players that have played almost everyday for 4 months and they have a voting power of 2 or 3 while someone that was here 3 years ago has 35 voting power this system is not any better then the last it just garentees that old devs that like each other win. I know I was never gonna win but this is just getting silly.  This system discourages newer devs.

I'm wondering how a game with 5 players (https://sbox.game/yevtamlero/deadinside) is #25 in the rankings? 

I think the changes are in the right direction but the scaling and weights are wayyy off. Like mentioned above, a game with only 5 players is 25th place and the game above it has 386 players. I understand one can have much higher quality than the other but this disparity seems too extreme

I’m the creator of One More Raid. In less than 5 days we reached around 686 players, 392 hours of playtime, and a 25 minute average, and climbed all the way to Top 4 before the new vote changes.  IMO, these are crazy numbers for such a short amount of time. It genuinely feels like we pulled off the impossible. 

Spellslinger has around 438 players, 500 hours of playtime, and a 45 minutes average, and One More Room has around 832 players, 458 hours of playtime, and a 24 minutes average. Listed in the top 5 as well before the changes

So how are games with under 90 players, offering almost no meaningful amount of entertainment time overall for the platform, ranking above games generating hundreds of players and hundreds of hours of engagement for the platform? Leaving us screwed last minute

The whole platform is built around playtime and engagement, and PlayFund. We brought in a large number of players and earned those votes through real engagement, and now those votes mean nothing.

It seems like highly influential users now have the ability to make or break the voting, which gives individuals/groups way too much control over the rankings.

There are also concerns with some of the current top games themselves. Gamma Team does not seem to fit the Round theme at all, and the level of polish makes people question whether the project was fully created within the 3 week jam period or whether an older project was adapted for the jam. Goblingeddon has also had questions raised around older builds being used during the event.

TLDR: I’m salty because we got rug pulled in last 24 hours and I pretty much sold my soul to S&Box for past 3 weeks. The voting system changed so individual users now have way more power, while games that brought in tons of players and provided hundreds of hours of entertainment to the platform got screwed over by the new system. 

I'm the developer of One More Room and I agree with a lot of what Val said above,not to critique the other games in the jam but because I had been raising concerns about voting abuse with Facepunch well before this change happened.

One More Room managed to grow significantly throughout the beginning and first week of the game jam, building an organic player base and organic nominations through the S&Box community and platform. I was one of the earlier games to publish,  and I spent the entire length of the jam developing the game while also gradually building an audience of S&Box players.

By the time One More Room had reached 86 nominations, I had personally only asked five friends to play/playtest the game. The overwhelming majority of that support came from people who discovered and played the game through s&box itself. The game eventually reached over 800 players and 450+ hours of playtime, with a significant number of players spending multiple hours in it. 

At the same time, I was repeatedly raising concerns with Facepunch about what I believed was obvious nomination abuse. I brought it up through support tickets and contacted Facepunch developers through Discord, specifically asking for the nominations to be audited. I never received a response. 

My only goal during this game jam was to have fun and build a successful game for the jam, and in my opinion it is visible if you just play the game. You can see the version history and iteration and process I went through to build the game into what it is now, and so did many of the players. I've had players return and give me nominations after a patch or a fix, I've spent a considerable amount of effort to make sure I was active with the people playing the game during the jam. 

Changing how nominations are valued this late in the process, when the underlying problems had already been visible for at least a week, is extremely frustrating. I completely understand that Facepunch needed to address abuse, but changing the scoring methodology at the end also has consequences for developers who spent the jam following the rules and legitimately building their audience under the system we were given. 

And regardless of the outcome of this jam, if the engagement numbers Val posted are accurate, I hope Facepunch also considers the value of developers and games that are able to capture a meaningful audience on the platform, bring people into s&box, and keep them playing for hours. I think that should matter.