It's already ethically wrong in the spirit of a competition to be asking complete strangers individually to like your post. If you want to bring more attention to your post, you could have at least worded it like "Can you please check out my halloween event post? You can like it if you enjoy it". It has a very different connotation to it that is not directly asking for likes on your post.
I mean everyone or some people do the same thing(ask people to like their posts) by using different ways. That’s not much of different than asking strangers. I didn’t expect this when I participated this event. It’s quite funny to see this argument occurs, but I totally understand why people care so much because of the reward, and don’t like how other people get more likes than theirs. Are you sure you don’t want to just remove this category from current event as well?
Hello everyone, this thread has been moved to the Accepted Subsection (since technically it was accepted before it was even made). Thank you all for sharing your opinions as respectfully as possible--I had planned to create a feedback thread for forum events after the costume contest concluded, but it seems that it needed to happen earlier. And just to address some underlying questions and concerns: The People's Choice award began with the very first forum event I hosted, which was last year's costume contest. I decided to create this award because when I was a player, I often saw feedback from players complaining that Staff were either explicitly or at least implicitly biased in selecting entries submitted by their friends or entries that referenced inside jokes that only some players knew of. So I wanted to provide the community with at least a bit of agency over selecting forum event winners. In addition, this award was an additional opportunity for players to participate in forum events beyond just submitting an entry. I fully recognized from the beginning that this award would essentially be a popularity contest. And while some players unfortunately may have been discouraged to submit an entry due to this award, it has nevertheless provided an incredible traction to forum events to extents we have never seen before. As for the particular entry in question, players seem to have two issues at its core: 1. The group temporarily removed their entry. For the record, there is no rule against editing your entry. The group was notified by another player after submitting their entry that their entry may be offensive, and approached me to request permission to proactively edit their entry which I granted. We actually have done this in past forum events. And arguing that temporarily removing your entry violates the rule that players may not reserve spots in the thread is a bad-faith application of that rule. 2. The group campaigned others for their entry. I personally believe that this is fair game, that this is a fun way to shake things up, and that this is honestly pretty commendable for the lengths one would go to win a forum event lol. With that being said, I do understand and empathize with the view that doing so violates the spirit of forum events and overall leaves a bad taste in the mouths of your fellow players. At the end of the day, players would not have voiced either of these concerns had it not been for The People's Choice award to compete over. So I don't believe that either of these concerns are inherent issues in and of themselves, but are rather reflective of the inherent issues within The People's Choice award. And with the stakes rising with the introduction of exclusive forum event prizes, perhaps the time has come to scrap this award altogether. We likely won't be removing this award for this event since we don't want forum events to be retroactively affected by personal influences, but we will be removing this award for future events. And so the next time a player complains about our selection of forum event winners, please kindly refer them to this post. We offered democracy, and this event proved that y'all don't deserve it. On that note, I will also tease that Staff as a whole are looking to actively gather more input with our seasonal events. I am particularly keen on hearing how we can encourage greater participation in forum events, so I look forward to hearing more of everyone's thoughts in the future. Thank you!
