Sprite Theme Contest v.3

[Siegvar]

@Klod:
I'm just assuming here... but that system looks like it'd still only aggravate the situation.
The whole problem lies in people only voting for the "best" few sprites, thus causing "Good" sprites that are relatively less impressive than the "Great" sprites to NOT GET VOTES... and is a lousy indicator of how well those sprites have done, and a terrible hit to the participants' morale.
Your system just gave even more weight to different voters, but does not address the misleading chasm between the "good" and "great" sprites' votes received, and in fact feeds it.

Anyway I thought I'd like to furthur explain my idea of how a Judge system or a Rating system could work.
The rationale of a Judge Panel, is essentially to act as a kind of "Mandatory Critique" request from the panel of judges, who presumably have been selected based on the fact that their opinion and advice is respected and generally taken to be logically agreeable, if not necessarily emphatically agreeable.

This "Mandatory Critique"'s purpose, is multi-fold:
1)To give appropriate credit and acknowledgement to superb entries in respect to factors other than the final outcome of the sprite.
2)To encourage people to think about more than "Oh, that sprite's the most awesome, can't be bothered to look at the rest." if they are selected to be the judge.
3)This is more of an attribute of having a "Panel of Judges", but whatever: When left to votes by anyone and everyone, different people have different thresholds for deciding how good an entry is before they decide to vote for or not vote for them. This, coupled with different perspectives and opinions on the quality of the entries among voters, may cause a lousy representation of the overall opinion of entries in the vote count. A panel of judges would necessarily have a more unified qualification system or ruleset by which to determine the quality of the entries, and avoid such imbalances. (Okay, this may sound like a bunch of crap right now coz I'm sleepy and can't word it properly.... but I hope I got my point across.)

Anyway, maybe this isn't necessarily at all if the regular voters would all spend more time writing constructive criticisms for ALL entries when they vote... and I guess at this point I'm technically shooting myself... LOL.


Another system that might work is a "Rating" system.
Right now the voting system is a "multi-vote-poll-list" where voters can either vote for, or not vote for, any number of the entries.
This roughly translates to a 1 and 0 rating... in other words... either a "pass" or a "fail"
The threshold that determines whether an entry gets a 1 or 0 is different for everyone, and this disparity in the threshold -might- cause a tilt in the outcome of the poll, depending on individual voters' preferences.
However, changing the system to have voters rate entries on a scale of 1 to 10, would technically allow voters to give different levels of approval ratings for the entries, thus allowing them to "pass" all the entries, while still being able to contribute to distinguishing the entries by their quality, without being forced to "Fail" certain entries just to make that distinction between the "Good" sprites.. and the "Great" sprites.