Showroom2 Voting

While we have successfully contained the plague of downvoting in Need for Speed Underground 2 Showroom, another problem has emerged. I've analyzed the user rating of cars in the showroom and I've come to some shocking facts:

* [b]34% of the votes in the showroom are 10s, 24% are 9s - almost 50% of cars in the showroom are perfect or near to perfect[/b]
* [b]only 27% of cars have more than 5 votes[/b]
* [b]average rating for all cars is 6.3 but for cars with more than 5 votes it's 8.3[/b]
* [b]33% of the cars have a rating higher than 9.0[/b]

What this has lead to is that cars from users with most friends get all the spotlight while cars from others are left in the dark. This has ultimately made our showroom unfriendly to most of the users and I've decided this will no longer be tolerated.

First of all I have some guidelines for voting:
Rating scale from 1-10 is there for a reason. A perfect rating scale should look something like this:

[b]10 - Perfect
9 - Awesome
8 - Very good
7 - Good
6 - Average
5 - Below average
4 - Bad
3 - Very bad
2 - Terrible
1 - Worst of all[/b]

Now remember, there are very close to none perfect things on the world and that's how your 10 votes should be distributed. Same as 1s as there can't be many The Worst Cars around, [b]the 10s and 1s shouldn't take more than 5% each of all your votes[/b].
Same thing, there cannot be many awesome cars, nor terrible cars, so each should take no more than about 6-8% of your votes. There can be quite a lot of Very good and Very bad cars around, so around 12-15% of your votes to each should be ok. Most of the cars are in the scale of 4-7, so these votes should take the majority of all your votes (60-70%).


Ok now that I've discussed how the perfect voting structure should look like, let's get to the penalties for those of you misusing it. There are plenty of those that rated more than 50% of cars a 10. This clearly is upvoting especially when they give the 10 votes to the same people over and over. Let me just say that we are watching you and if you don't improve action will be taken:

* first we will wipe all your votes
* if once again you keep giving out too many 10s, your garage will be wiped (all your cars deleted) and all your votes deleted
* the third time is the last time: the two steps above will be done plus your account deactivated

If in any step we notice you giving low votes to random showroom cars just to improve your voting structure while still giving high votes to the same people, step 3 will be taken.


In conclusion, do not be afraid to give out a vote lower than 8. We will not ban anyone who votes normal between 1 and 10. Don't forget that anti-downvoting rules still apply and let me remind you all what exactly that means: giving extremely low votes (1-3) to cars that are ranked close to yours. Also having more than one account is strictily prohibited and will results in all acounts being terminated.


With these new guidelines we will wait one month to see if the statistics have improved. If after one month there will still be upvoting issues we will start fixing the votes manually (by deleting votes and users). Let me remind you that at least 3 teams were deleted so far for upvoting. This may go further.

I hope you understand the reasons why I have decided to act in this way and please do take into consideration what's written in this post.

There is a site-wide poll to vote on whether all votes in the showroom should be cleared so we can have a clean start once again. Please vote (poll is located in the right menu).