My name is Wollongong, and I voted in favour of action being taken. Actually, I voted for an action which went further than the one implemented.
Karma has never lived up to it's true potential. It was meant to be an indicator of content quality (as others before me pointed out), but it has turned into a meaningless number, based on friends scratching eachothers back, clickbait-posts, people taking revenge for being hosped, and other nonsensical stuff.
Thing is, people started to value the number more, than the thing is is supposed to indicate, and thus began the era of manipulation, farming and playing the system. This probably began around 3 hours after Karma began.
Some people just downrate any thread from a specific group of people (I know two or three people were sufficiently lacking RL meaning to focus on me, downrating anything I posted.... I never really understood why they bothered so much). And some people uprate their friends. I am pretty confident there's actually people mailing others to ask them to uprate their posts.
And that is pretty much the only plausible explanation why some long posts which are well thought out get no upvotes, while "Yeah, what he said" can score +15
The travelthread is indeed a valuable thread, but it should be valuable for the intrinsic value, not for the karma. As a matter of fact, I *KNOW* that the thread could be used for farming, because I tried it. I looked at some posts, took an guesstimate for a reasonable number, fabricated a post and published it. Instant +10 karma. Now, I am pretty bad at coming up with ways to cheat, so I am confident I am not the only one who came up with this. Such manipulation, polluting the thread, is now pointless.
I have, from the beginning, made a habit of uprating posts which show some effort. Some thinking. I don't have to agree with you, but I will still upvote you when you make a good and serious effort to support your position. You're still wrong though, and I am right ;)
Downvoting is an action I seldom take. But when I do, I do it because the post REALLY is crap. Either no thinking at all involved, or just blatant lies being told.
PS: to all those who are annoyed for not reaching VIP now. Don't be sad. It's crap. It's mostly MarlonBrandon creating useless stuff anyway. Some of his posts are actually fun, but that's the law of large numbers: if you make so many thread, one or two are bound to be funny. That too is a type of karmapharming which should, somehow, be countered. On the other hand... I might be wrong in my opinion, so keep upvoting him if you feel that way. However, VIP is crap... as many before me already mentioned.
The freedom of information act is only valid for information which has been created or used in public institutions. A forum such as this can hardly be classified a public institution.
PS: to all those who are annoyed for not reaching VIP now. Don't be sad. It's crap. It's mostly MarlonBrandon creating useless stuff anyway. Some of his posts are actually fun, but that's the law of large numbers: if you make so many thread, one or two are bound to be funny. That too is a type of karmapharming which should, somehow, be countered. On the other hand... I might be wrong in my opinion, so keep upvoting him if you feel that way. However, VIP is crap... as many before me already mentioned.
It makes sense that they would add one with this update. If it is actually a challenge to receive 1000 karma instead of a grind through flower thread, then an award is reasonable. Otherwise flower thread would just have been more flooded than normal...
On the other hand now we are going to see a bunch of horrid threads popping up by people trying to farm karma.
Well, you know if Wollongong and I agree on anything, it has legs. Personally, karma could disappear from Torn tomorrow and I would not miss it. However, I'm sick of the whining and female-dogging (cert. PG-13) that goes on about how flower runners are farming karma. I wish I could have posted on the flower thread and turned off receiving karma, but I couldn't. I finally stopped posting on the flower thread altogether about a month ago to avoid the continual "noise" of likes filling up the "Feed" box.
I completely support the exclusion of the flower and plushie threads from karma mainly because it clutters up your personal feedback list for "real" posts. Note that I had over 2,000 karma rescinded for flowers, so if you're crying over 100 points just STFU. I think the entire trading forum should be excluded along with fun and games, those forums are not really game-enriching discourse.
Good job, and I'm guessing it was an easy fix that didn't take away from real development time. If it did delay roll-out of territories, then the prioritization was off, this isn't that important.
Long, well thought out posts often don't receive as much karma either because enough people skip reading them that they won't gather as many upvotes, or the longer the post is, the higher the chance you say one thing a person might disagree with, and thus they don't rate it up.
However, some of us like a good read and don't mind things we disagree with, just good discussion.
I am not an avid travel thread poster and I don't have any karma from that thread, but imho, for all the reasons that people get karma.. that thread is one place where people get karma while actually helping people.
From what I have seen, karma is mostly a popularity contest atm and unless the intent of this update was to enforce that, I think it is a bad change. I would love to see the committee discussion regarding this proposal but from where I stand it seems like it was a change initiated by those who got their karma by being popular to stop helpful people from getting into their "VIP Club".
I had mixed feelings about this idea when it was proposed, however whilst it is far from a perfect solution to making 'karma' something that is meaningful it is definitely a step in the right direction in my opinion.
Whilst a number of options were discussed, many of which being specific for certain threads, a wide number of threads that met a certain criteria or a weighted option for karma in certain boards/threads I was more in favour of the weighted option, however each proposed it's own set of issues. The simplest change that would affect the least number of people who generally had not contributed to the forums was chosen. Whilst I still feel that there is definite argument that the flower and plushie thread did exist to do a great deal of help and good for players another argument was that why would there need be two of them for the same purpose? Plus there were many who felt that these threads were merely 'spoilers' in the grand scheme of things which took away some of the mystery and purpose of the stock system in place, although of course people are still perfectly welcome to post such updates in the thread itself, and in my own opinion if people suddenly stop doing that then it just proves that it was only being done by some for karma itself anyway.
When the 2nd highest karma player in the game has gone from 6300 to 20 in a single fell swoop.... something feels a bit off with how the karma system was working to allow that.
ched nerfs travel thread, there goes 3/4 my karma lol, not sure what the issue was, how is updating travelrun/travelthread not helpful, *sigh* oh well guess i'll just start a meme war with MarlonBrando lol
I voted this through but for me personally didnt think much of it has karma to me isnt really important and doesnt effect game play in the slightest, as soon as ched named it karmageddon it was always gonna get pushed through haha xD
But yeh no complaints from my point of view, I dont like the fact that people have been getting thousands of Karma from just simply copy and paste a page, no effect what so ever put into it.
Just in case you meant me (highly doubt it actually, there were others...) I could post a lot in the travel thread when I stayed at home to care for my newborn daughter. After I went back to work, I was most of the time on mobile or tablet. So copying and pasting wasn't a very attractive thing. Others could have had also a reason which isn't obvious. Just saying.
I definately agree with you that the karma gained by both threads were ridiculous. Think I even got karma for a post which was a week old a couple of days ago.
Still, the amount of karma gained by trolling, posting gifs is also pretty ridiculous and you know it.
Btw, did you do a dance of joy that the 2nd highest karma player is now way behind you? [:tongue:]
Marlo's thread in the VIP forum top 100 karma list, there's more than half that are well. bottom 100 now. While yes the travel thread is very useful and helps people. That's just ridiculous.
karma is worthless r+ r- does nothing people over use them regardless. you quote a bitch and he's like :D someone read what i said r+. you hate a bitch, you just ignore what he wrote and r- it.
can't control what players do, so karma it's still worthless, it will just take a little more effort to actually get karma now which is one step in making it a little less worthless.