Transparency - Define the result criteria for the vote!!!

How will DBG interpret the vote. Will it me most popular wins between all selections?

or

Will it be No early release vs. Early release and then popular vote on which early release option.

Really they should fix the vote but it may be that they are already trying to fix the vote by releasing a confusing vote. Who knows.

if release kunark asap > 1 vote, release kunark

else

release kunark anyway

I would assume they are smart enough to see that if you vote either of the extremes (NAUW! or 6 months!) Your implied second choice is 3 months.

So if the votes splits 40/30/30 (Now/3 months/6 months) you would lump the 30% that wanted 6 months together with the 3 months group and go with 3...

Same goes for the opposite if it comes out 30/30/40, that they should go with 3 months in that case.

When they held the vote as to whether the server should launch with Kunark and Velious, it's true that Velious votes should have been considered Kunark votes.

If you vote for 6, then 3 is better than 1. If you vote Now, then 3 is better than 6. However, by counting both extremes for 3, then it's going to weight the results toward 3 UNLESS 6 wins overwhelmingly and it will lead to thousand-post discussions of skewing all over again.

Daybreak REALLY should be giving people the ability to vote for 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6 total months in Kunark, and then using a formula to weight the results into a final number.

z

That's the odd thing about a vote like this. You have a (very real) case where no one option gets a majority, yet if you go with 3, you wind up forcing an option that did not win the vote? But if you go with now, you choose an option which did win, but more people voted for other things than that.

And why would you force it to 3? You could also ague that the people who chose 3 wanted more time and that 6 months was their implied second choice so you lump the 3-month 30% with the 6-month 30% and go with 6 months.

That's the problem with trying to interpret what people want without clear indication, there is no right answer and the likely outcome is that you piss a lot of people off.

This is why I think the most fair thing to do is simply and automatically poll every three months, ad finem temporis. If the server wants to end after three months of Classic, they will, and if they don't, their no vote will assure 6. If they want to hit up Velious after 3 in Kunark they will, and if not 6.

I do, however, think that they should put in a safety net that makes an automatic release after 9 months. It is a progression server, after all, not locked.

I posted this after the last poll:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoiler_effect

We are only voting to vote again... if "Now" wins by getting 34% of the vote (for the most extreme example) then clearly it would lose in the first unlock vote.

If people who want 'longer' outweigh people who want 'now' then the open Kunark vote will have to be retaken a few times before it passes. Most likely people will hurry a little more than they would have to complete what they want done since they won't know how much longer they have but a win for 'vote now' doesn't necessarily mean 'Kunark now.'

I do hope if they have a close vote like that though that they realize they split the vote and do another one to clarify but either way nothing unlocks until the majority unlocks it so no need to worry about it.

That would, however, prevent people from being able to vote to keep it locked at a certain point in time. I do not think it would happen, but if the majority wants to stay in Velious (for example) forever, they should be able to.

Personally I hope 6 months wins by a clear majority over the other two options and we can finally put the subject to rest and play on the servers as advertised.

They seem to have answered the question as to whether each server will have its own vote already, what they haven't said is whether any time removed from Classic only will be added into Kunark and/or Velious as was originally proposed in the voting everyone was whining was flawed.

If that situation did unfold, everyone (not necessarily on a person for person basis) who complains they aren't getting their 6 months would be turned around into complaining about being put on a locked server. Difference is, they were never promised 6 months, but it was promised to be a Progression server. Everyone who's been subscribing to build characters for X expansion down the road will have been bona fide (or should I say mala fide?) bait and switched if it never comes and no transfers are offered to a similar, non-Live progression server.

I wish the vote was merely "keep kunark at 6 months or early release it?" with a follow up with the time frame. votes are gonna get split up so much. oh well.

I used to make crooked polls for a living.
Yeah, I'm not proud of it.

So let's look at the choices:
1) No Preference - this is added as a 'spoiler candidate'. No preference can be used to skew the vote by diluting the total ballot base. This should count, as it does in union polling, as a "no change" vote, however it's unlikely that it will. This is important and I'll math it down below.

2) Naow! - this is one of the two "for change" votes. Pretty Straightforward, yet independent of #3

3) 3 Months! - this is another "for change" vote.

4) 6 Months! - This is a second "No Change" vote.

So let's take 100 voters.

25/25/25/25 a dead tie - is a wash and Daybreak can do pretty much whatever they want.

But this gets more interesting when we look at the whole picture.

20/31/29/20

That's 31 votes for Naow. But really, when you consider the "no change" votes as a block of #1 and #4, No Change is the clear winner (40 vs. 31). Thus by including the no preference and counting it as its own delegation, the vote is skewed against retaining the current server rules. A vote of no preference absolutely should indicate a "no change" vote. "I do not care enough to actively change the rules of the server" is what "no preference" really means.

Let's take it another direction while we have the math. Let's look at the unlikely breakdown of

40/10/40/10

Do the two loser candidates' delegates get shuffled over to either 'naow' or '6 months'? What are the rules?

Imagine, if you will, if all absent or abstaining representatives or senators had their votes counted as 'nay' votes in congress. How much legislation do you think would pass?

This is one of the common misconceptions of democracy - democracy is not the rule of the people, it's the rule of the people who choose to participate.

TL;DR - ANY poll that does not clearly give you the criteria for victory should not ever be trusted to render a correct result.

In the history ofI the progression servers there has been what, like 2 failed.voted, ever. I wouldn't hold your breath on thinking a ton of votes are going to fail and we might be locked into an expansion for a while.

Also, just because someone doesn't have an opinion doesn't mean they should immediately be counted towards no change. I voted for 6 months on 6 accounts. But honestly I don't care. If kunark released tomorrow it would make such a minute difference that I wouldn't even be concerned.

Lumping no preference into no change is how you skew vote results. Not the vote itself.

You also did not account for the people that don't vote at all. Are they no preference? Are they no change? Just take the vote as what it is. A way to appease people.

no preference is a non vote in the event you open the poll to see what the options are and have to register a vote of some sort.

the other non vote is simply not opening the poll options to begin with.

Release early as possible was only an option because if they hadn't included it people would have complained it wasn't offered and 3 months was too long.

If they are looking at what the majority wants out of their poll if 50% or more want 6 months that's 6 months, if more than 50% vote for 3 months and either 6 months or as early as possible that's 3 months. If more than 50% vote open it as early as possible you open the vote as early as possible. No preference is a non vote. so assuming the vote falls 30/29/41 that would be 3 months since clearly 3 months would be as early as possible for the majority. The same could be said for a vote of 41/30/29 since still 59% of the players voting want to extended the voting at least 3 months if not longer.

The way the poll is set up is a huge fail and is going to lead to someone having to interpret whether or not votes for 3 or 6 months are actually against immediate Kunark. Should have been a simple yes/no poll - Do you want the original plan or a quicker release? Then if quicker wins another poll for timeline preference - immediate, 1 month or 3 months.

In my opinion they need to have a vote every month. More voting is a good thing. It gets a gauge on the current population's wavelength. The fact we are having a vote to have a vote is ridiculous. If the majority of people want kunark open, then majority rules - that is democracy. If only a minority vote for kunark then so be it.

To those who say they should keep to the same rules that were envisioned at the start need to understand that dynamics change after the fact. Yes we all somewhat knew what we were getting into, but at the same time, there are some factors that were out of our purview, overpopulation, for one, which leads to many challenges such as ksing trash mobs to name one of many problems. If we are going to have a vote, it should not be a vote to have a vote, but a straight up vote.

Six months would have to beat all the other options combined to stay at six months. It's that simple.

I agree with that.

But voting at all has always caused so many issues, like many saying they are voting for six months just to anger TL.

And the six month per expac plan has always been insane.