I'm done with guides here

I downvoted every one of your guides.

I saw that, thanks.

No problem, I'm just here to be a troll. I downvote everyone equally though.

You actually take the two seconds required to throw up a one liner of why.

The issue is that there are just not enough users hanging around the site yet, so there isn't enough vote volume going around. Most guides have only 1 or 2 votes, many have none, it's impossible to predict the potential score with only a couple votes, which is what the formula is trying to do. Restricting votes to a smaller group isn't going to help, we need more votes all around.

There are a lot of things on the site that are going to be awkward while things grow. We're open to suggestions but the solution is really just "get more people on here", which is hard when the game isn't even out yet :(

We could just hide the scores and use them only for ranking in the background... Until things pick up. We find though, that authors would rather see their score. Thoughts? Other ideas?

Don't forget to use the report system if you suspect someone is cheating or trolling, we will investigate.

I am actually yet to use the voting system.

Cheers for the info Matt

Also just want to mention that we have over two years of IP address bans and proxy bans (as well as spam blacklists and such) from MOBAFire that are also on DOTAFire :)

Yay for less trolls from the get go!

Regarding the suggestion of mandatory comments when voting...

We tried this on MOBAFire. It basically resulted in rioting. Authors began retaliating against negative voters, making threats, blackmailing, harassing and stalking them until they changed or deleted their vote.

The comments are generally things like "asdfasdfsadf" or "nice guide +1" or "guide not good -1". Why? Because these users came to vote, not to comment. If they wanted to comment they'd have done that. If you try to force someone to comment that doesn't want to, you're just gonna get garbage. If they wanted to comment they would anyways.

Many users made alt accounts in order to cast negative votes safely. Other voters were afraid to vote negatively due to aggression and retaliation from authors. The result was that guide scores became artificially inflated and it became entirely too easy to get perfect or near perfect scores.

It does occasionally remind people to comment that might not have otherwise but the harm massively outweighed the benefits.

TLDR: It doesn't work. Sorry to sound so negative about the idea but you wouldn't believe what we went through over this concept on MOBAFire and how quickly people forget how it went down.

We're open to other suggestions though, especially temporary solutions until the site picks up. Just not mandatory comments.