Does anyone know if we'll have access to voting data at any point, maybe even after the elections are over?

I ask because of this: we have no friggin' clue if our platform is working or not. Was it the people in our one ally guild voting for us that helped so much, or did people like our ideas? I have no clue.

At least with hard numbers after the election, we could perhaps deduce whether it was our platform that worked or not (ie we have 75 people in our guild, but 2,000 voted for us, ergo, they must've liked our platform).

Could not disagree more. Voting should be confidential. If you were allowed to know, the whole system would be completely pointless.

I have spoken to a GM about this and I was told they would not be releasing the information at any point.

You shouldn't be able to see who voted for you. [filtered] bad idea. You get to see where you are in the standings and if you don't like where you are then you need to work harder next time.

Why should a member/officer/hooker of your guild vote for you because they are in your guild, and why should you be able to confront them about it?

Quote: Devoire on 05/26/2012, 10:58 PM - view

Wow, this sucks

Without even NUMBERS, we have no friggin' clue what works and why. We can only blindly try the same things if it worked before or try something new if it didn't work, and then you have to do ONE thing per election or forever have no clue.

Did that new alliance pay off or was it your change of platforms? WHO KNOWS...

Quote: Ahmon on 05/26/2012, 10:57 PM - view
Any real election allows you to see the raw numbers of the results. There's no need to give out who voted, just how many.

Quote: Destian on 05/26/2012, 11:06 PM - view
Then do your homework. Run focus groups. Do polls. Read your server forums and the forums of major guilds on your server. The information is accessible.

yeah you need to get the information your self just like in real life.

Quote: Ahmon on 05/26/2012, 11:09 PM - view

Without any comparison numbers, it's all worthless. You're suggesting that I assemble a puzzle with no edge pieces, thus I'll never know how large it truly is.

Say in election 1 you run with a platform of "no taxes" and have one ally guild.

You place 5th.

Election 2 rolls around. You run with the same platform but swap ally guilds.

This time, you place 10th.

The problem here is, with no frame of reference, you cannot determine anything. Did the new ally not provide enough votes, or did other guilds just get that many more votes this time, or did your platform not sound as promising the 2nd time around, or was your ally lying about voting for you, or did someone bribe your own members to not vote for your guild?

With SOME form of numerical data, you'd have a way to answer these questions. As it stands, you have NOTHING. No one is obligated to even tell you the truth, and let's be honest, focus groups are just going to get trolled.

Again, there's too little to go on, here. The political system in this state is 90% crapshoot.

At the very least, we should be able to see the number of votes we got. That way, if we place 5th one election and 10th the next, we can compare the number of votes we received each time and know that WE didn't change but other guilds did. When you change platforms, you can see if it was more or less popular, even in comparison to other guilds.

Without the numbers, we can't deduce much.

Quote:

In real elections, you get to see the number of votes.

Should show voting percentages at the end. Not numbers as this can give away subscription counts and I know publishers dont like doing that. That's why it needs to be percentages.

Guild 1: 36%
Guild 2: 30%
Guild 3: 10%
Guild 4: 9%
Guild 5: 15%

Edit: Although this can be used to work out subscription counts too. Just set up a bad guild and vote with your friends. You can get a rough idea of the amount of voters on each server.

Probably never going to happen then.