It's official, the TA Forum's GOTY is Bastion, with Ravensword: Shadowlands in second and Walking Dead: The Game taking 3rd place.
Next year let's be way more clear who can and can't vote, as the reason I posted this on the front page was to get more people involved. It seems super shady to do a poll like this then arbitrarily decide whose vote does and doesn't count based on the number of posts they have and which threads they were in. Like, votes removed from Ravensword because a dude had less than 20 posts and they were all in the Ravensword thread? Of course he's going to vote for Ravensword. Last minute discounting of votes would've made the difference between who won, which makes the whole thing that much more dodgy. If you're only going to count specific people, why bother doing a open poll in the first place? I could see deleting votes if someone registered a dozen accounts from the same IP with throwaway emails to stuff the ballot box, but that didn't seem to be the case here. Also, leonard_dabinski, I have no clue what you're on about but you come off as pretty crazy. Not sure if that's intentional or not.
Agree about making the voting rules more clear. Next year only I should vote so that season 2 of TWD wins!
I meant all I said. The problem is the mods aren't on the same wavelength as you. See the following conversation for example:
I don't see any rules for this anywhere, in either thread. Where is this minimum post count stuff coming from? Unless it was specifically laid out somewhere that you need X posts to be allowed to vote doesn't it seem like everyone but obvious shills (of which I don't think there are?) should be allowed to participate? This is a pretty huge thread, so if I missed the poll rules somewhere my apologies but it seems like they should be in the first post if there are any.
Ask your dearest mods sire. I asked them to lay it out to but none did. Especially Crex. On what grounds were they thrown out? We all deserve to know this.
It comes from Echoseven's weekly GoTW threads from what I can incur. The rules weren't clear in this aspect.
These are the posted rules from there: Were developers asking people to create accounts specifically to vote for their games? I mean by definition you sort of need to be a TA member to vote, as you have to be logged in. I mean I guess you could expand that to "senior members only" but even that seems sort of dodgy because of how many people who just lurk but still play lots of iOS games?
Yes. Devs were bringing in outside people to join up on TA and vote for their games. It was a pretty big issue/problem
I posted on my Twitter account to 'Vote for Ravensword in the TA Poll!' I don't see why that is an issue though, its not like anyone can't have an account on Touch Arcade, in fact, everyone should! A lot of my fans on Twitter are TA members as well. I'm not entirely sure the reasons for deleting votes - but this is starting to remind me of a certain Presidential election which involved pregnant chads.....
Well, if voters are being intensely screened it shouldn't be an open poll. The way the whole thing reads is this is just the pick for GOTY for forum members, and I think the definition of "forum members" for most is people who are just properly registered to post. I mean if a group of people want to come up with what their favorite game is that's cool but it seems disingenuous to call that the forum game of the year with such nebulous guidelines on whose opinion is being counted. It seems OK for developers to tell people to vote for their games, as it's just raising awareness for the whole poll in general... Assuming it is actually a poll, I guess.
Not that it matters much now, but these were obvious shills. If I remember correctly, when the weekly threads started up developers were doing just that, which is why they unofficially (unrecorded), made it so that you must either have (1) A join date of at least a month ago or (2) have X amount of posts. I must agree though: for at least the GoTY poll, it should be open to anyone, provided there aren't any duplicate IP addresses being used....though its not hard to get around this.
Yeah, it turned more into a which Dev has the most friends type of poll... But I guess that's what you risk having a completely open poll... I won't say that I completely agree with the rules, but I see the reasoning behind em... **oh Canada...**
OK but you can't just randomly decide after the whole thing takes place which votes are going to count based on unofficial unrecorded rules in some previous game of the week thread. I mean ideally shouldn't these types of things exist to encourage people to get involved in the forum community or to register to vote which might also lead to them posting here? I don't know, I guess I just don't see the logic in being so exclusionary with this. These random vote deletions sort of nullifies the whole thing to me, especially with how close the poll is to begin with. I mean, how can I post about it on the front page now? "Bastion wins TouchArcade forum game of the year with Ravensword in a close second depending on whose votes you count?"
A genuine point to ponder on. Josh called on his followers to vote in the goty thread. I don't think this is wrong. But for the other 9 games, the devs do not interfere at all. Is this not unfair? Is this not fair representation of the choice by TA members? The fairest thing is to only allow those with one months worth of membership tovot in future polls. Problem solved.
