I would appreciate if someone could clearly explain how the housing leaderboards work in terms of earning trophies, landmarks, how votes effect the gold/silver counters. I know that the name - color is explained on Homes & Tomes (http://bit.ly/UP6Get) and that the colors are related to reaching a numerical landmark. ~~ What are those numerical landmarks and how do I explain them to our guildees? ~~ I understand the publishing process and that if you move forward to the Hall of Fame and unpublish your house to add your trophy, when you re-publish you are placed back in the base category (sm, med. lrg, mass). ~~ How you get back on the Hall of Fame list after re-publishing (although I have seen reference on wikia that it is related to a voting cycle)? ~~ ~~ What is the voting cycle and is it broken or changed when a server is reset, rebooted, or a game update is launched? ~~
Each day at 6 PM PST, awards are given out on all servers to the top five homes in the "Creativity (Recent)" and "Style (Recent)" categories. These awards are the silver awards you see on homes. The top house in each of the "Creativity (Recent)" and "Style (Recent)" categories receives a gold award in addition to the silver award. The numerical landmarks are the number of awards associated with each house. For example, if a house has between 10 and 24 awards associated with it, the title of the house will be gold on the leaderboards. The awards are the "gold/silver counters" you see beneath a home's name when you select it on the leaderboards. The most important numerical landmark is of course, 50 awards. At 50 awards, a home enters the Hall of Fame. For a home to return to the Hall of Fame after republishing, it must simply earn one more award. So if a home is removed from the leaderboards after entering the Hall of Fame, and it has 52 awards associated with it, when it is republished, on the 53rd award it reenters the Hall of Fame. I am assuming that is because the game does not check the amount of awards a home has received unless it receives another award. The voting cycle appears quite robust. I have yet to see it break due to server reset, reboot, or GU launch. The countdown on votes in the (Recent) category is 7 days from when the vote was cast. I believe that is 7 days of server up time, so when the server is down for maintenance of any sort, the votes simply stop counting down until the server is back up. After 7 days, votes "fall off" of homes in the (Recent) category. This allows all homes a fair chance to earn awards. An old home does not have any better of a chance to earn awards than a new home.
