Players are then given rewards for “guessing” which experience will win. This entices and rewards players for selecting experiences with the highest vote count, not what they personally liked. This leads to specific forced vote outcomes, and all but guarantees that particular experiences are going to win the vote as soon as voting opens.
This is extremely disrespectful to the developer community! Developers work hard to find success, and instead of their experiences being used in a voting process that removes bias as much as reasonably possible, this year the process is as biased as possible.
The voting hub should not, under any circumstances, be displaying current vote totals to players, ESPECIALLY when there are rewards associated with “guessing” the winner correctly ahead of time. The damage has already been done for one category, Roblox needs to fix this as soon as possible to prevent this bias from impacting other categories. The innovation awards are meant to be a celebration of the developer community & highlight highly enjoyed experiences, this issue is not in the spirit of that!
I do NOT know what they were thinking with this, it needs to be changed ASAP… The whole point of the event is the build up towards it and wondering who will win, I genuinely hate this feature so much. It really defeats the purpose of it all
UPDATE : After speaking with developer relations, here’s what’s actually going on.
The big voting panel that displays the vote counts is for selecting your prediction for which experience will win, it is NOT a panel for voting for the experience that will actually win in a given category.
The prediction hub is where you can place your winner predictions ahead of time. The farther out you lock-in your prediction, the more points you get. If you change your prediction, you lose points. As such bias is punished & discouraged.
Based on this information, my feedback would be:
Clearly label & indicate at the big prediction hub that it is in fact, a prediction hub. Not a winner voting hub.
Better explain how the points system & prediction hub works. If it confused myself & other developers to the point that it has here, I can only imagine how much it’s confusing regular players.
The number of votes should NOT be shown no matter the reason, it’s very demotivating and demoralizing if you’re a developer of the game watching that number. Secondly, it’s influencing people’s votes, seeing this number will cause the average player to choose the most popular pick- leading to unfair bias.
I thought the innovation awards are meant to uplift and celebrate everyone’s achievements, but this doesn’t feel very uplifting and it’s disheartening
I’m confused. At the hub there are two separate panels/areas labeled RDC Voting and Predictions. The RDC Voting was to vote for categories where the winners would be announced during RDC and the prediction area was to predict which games would win in the other categories. At first I thought the categories that players would predict on were the categories where Roblox would choose the winners for. But then I was even more confused when there was daily voting for each category. I was under the impression that the daily votes were to determine the winners of those categories but apparently not from that explanation?
That was the explanation I was given, but then if you log in you are presented with this:
It’s worded like TOH won the category for the awards ceremony. And if that is the case, the ceremony is pointless because the system had an insane amount of bias & everyone knows the winners ahead of time.
The official Roblox twitter account is promoting today’s voting as voting for the winners and not as a prediction voting. I think that the explanation devrel provided was incorrect.
You cannot change your vote after it is submitted. This should hopefully reduce some bias in the results of people just voting for whatever has the most currently.
Unfortunately, even with this edit; it fails to do this. People have grouped up to ensure they know who is winning at all times by having one person vote and continuously comment on the vote counts. The number of times I’ve heard, “Who is winning?” in the past few days is insane. On top of this, even without visible vote counts, users are still encouraged to only predict and vote for what is considered the ‘community favourite’ rather than any personal preference since that is what will probably win.
In all reality, the only solution to this would be to not have voting on the same categories as predictions.
Although displaying vote counts afterwards may make players adjust their predictions, I don’t see how that directly affects voting results. Although possible, I’d say for any given voter it’s less than a 1% chance they ask their friend who is winning before they cast their vote. It’s just is too much work for a player who wouldn’t have a reason to care (they aren’t the one receiving the award).
If your desire is to fix predictions, you could simply disable predictions for a category once voting opens for it. Seems like it would work, right?
Even so, I don’t think predictions are what the OP here was worried about, but rather bias in voting.
Edit: I do agree though, that the whole “predictions” concept is flawed as it encourages voting for the community favorite rather than personal favorites. However, that seems outside the scope of what this topic was concerned about which was the displaying of current vote counts before voting.
@Noble_Draconian I’d like to thank you for speaking out about this, especially on devforum, one of the best ways to get the idea across to small devs of Roblox. I think it’s truly disheartening, and disappointing that it has everyone talking about these “predictions” that improve Roblox’s retention, while all of the games that are at the voting hub are being overlooked.
Something sad I saw today in the awards was that there was a group of 3 people, who were waiting for the quick fire to update. They were farming near the predictions hub and waited a minute to see all the votes. Then they say “TOWER DEFENSE HURRY HURRY” as TDS gets significantly more votes than everyone else in the predictions. They run to predictions and begin to change their answer.
THIS IS HORRIBLE.
This is detrimental to all the genuine people following this, especially because this is a CLASSIC, dare I say, ORIGINAL thing that Roblox developers, Roblox YouTubers, UGC creators, and mainly, THE COMMUNITY of Roblox looks towards. We expect to see innovative content from Roblox, and we get prediction biased votes.
It’s terrible that people get this competitive for a trophy in their favorite games. Yes, some games may deserve it, but others may not. While I’m on a rant, I may as well call out another thing, POPULAR GAMES getting pitted against other 10k on average games that don’t stand a chance…
Berry Avenue vs. Brookhaven?? Which game has 300k+ on DAILY AVERAGE? Which game has been around LONGER? Brookhaven. So guess who wins? Brookhaven. If only they didn’t let the Roblox community get their hands on their precious little votes, because this is just out of hand.
TL;DR? People shouldn’t be biased on daily player averages and player counts.
I’m very disappointed with this year’s Innovation Awards. Overall, I feel that the voting process was overcomplicated, confusing, and flawed. The display of the vote count and the points system caused bias by encouraging players to vote with the majority, not their personal preference. Pretty much every voting day, I witnessed at least one player ask something along the lines of “Who is winning?” with the intention to vote for the experience that was currently in the lead. From this observation, I suggest disabling the chat for future voting hubs to avoid bias.
I understand wanting to have transparency with the vote count; However, I think it would be more ideal to display the vote counts once all voting is completed (possibly, at the awards ceremony) to further avoid bias. This would create greater suspense at the awards ceremony as well. Honestly, I think the process should be reverted to be more simple like how it was in previous years: Where voting could be completed all at once and there were no predictions (also, rename it back to the Bloxys).
I understand that it was probably too late to make major adjustments to the voting process for this year’s awards. I would just like to see it improved upon. It would be nice if we could receive further clarification on the current process and hear confirmation that measures will be taken to ensure the issues that caused bias won’t be repeated in the future.
As a side note, I don’t think it was right that some nominees made promises to their players in order to manipulate the vote. Some of these nominees have even lied to their players by going back on their promises. The voting process should be fair and respectful, so the nominees shouldn’t be allowed to interfere with it. Any nominee who tries to sway the vote should be immediately disqualified. This situation and the poor voting process has hurt the event by creating a toxic environment and causing a lot of drama in the community.
