how about a rule that the judge has to have a track with 15+ awards or smth?

heanry: why not add the additional rule as they all asked, but give it a twist.

why not add the rule: " you cannot give any vote under 5 unless: you can give a valid argument why you gave the track a 'bad' vote, or Explain why you gave that score."

something like this will give everyone a vision about what is wrong with the track, so they can improve themselfs in the future. also it gives others a chance to learn about what the "stream" likes and what not.
this rule will add chances to everyone who reads the comments.

also comments such as: "Bad", "Not my taste", "Not my enviroment", "I love canyon", etc.... would be invalid,
if the comment is invalid the track's score would be ignored.

or something like this.

I know this will still not be perfect but it will give a more accurate result while judging in my oppinion.

unusually high votes can be as bad as unusually low votes, so I don't necessarily agree with your suggestion.

denny, flame, and rockys7 should be banned from voting in the future...it's clear they sabotaged the results. they gave a 1, 2 , 2 on voy's map with no explanation and a 10, 9, and 9 to Denny's map which was disqualified...almost all of their scores are extremely low on every map.

The previous judging system had this rule often used in other official competitions, where the highest and lowest scores on each track were not included in the final ranking. Thus, the 'most extreme' votes (positive or negative) would not influence the average (if that's what we're still using). I'm not entirely certain if the effect will be equally good for a total score ranking (no average).

This system was only used on months where there were enough judges to omit one result; maybe five of them. If you have 20 results you could ignore the two (or maybe even three) highest and lowest scores instead.

I know this isn't necessarily a complete solution either, in case several people do malicious voting, but it reduces the effect.


Edit: I'll have to say that I strongly disagree with the previous suggestions for rule changes by Space and lolig.

lolig's rule simply lifts the lowest score to 5 instead of 1, in which case manipulators would simply vote 5. Although this limits the effect of giving low scores, the effect will still be there and the system ignores overly positive "friend boosting" votes altogether. And having judges for our judges looking though the results is only going to complicate ethics further, not to mention that nobody will have time for that in the first place.

Space's suggestion, about min 15 awards, is in my humble opinion a thoroughly elitist approach to the problem, where opinions matter only as much as your popularity matters. We're not building these tracks exclusively for our little clique of mutual admiration, but for the entirety of the community to enjoy as they may. There are plenty of good and enthusiastic drivers out there who haven't published a single map since building is not their thing, but whose comments could still prove invaluable to self-improvement in the builder. Hell, I've won one of these and I wouldn't necessarily qualify in this system.

broadsword, I guess you mixed up lolig and me. I didn't suggest anything.
And I agree with your opinion, it is not very handy to look through an entire voting sheet and read all the comments and check if there are any "suspicious" votes. Furthermore is the check for suspicious votes very subjective and strongly depends on who voted, because you judge people you know better differently than people you don't know.

There's also vote manipulation with very high votes, so we need to apply the 5 point rule in both directions. So we end up with a comment for every mark between 1 and 10. And if we only choose the 3 best and 3 worst marks, there are still many votes to check and it doesn't hinder voters to think of valid comments for vote manipulation.

The idea of eliminating best and worst marks sounds a lot better. We just need to see how many votes we should ignore so that we get good results. This idea is also good in that regard, that it does not complicate the voting process for the voters. (And ignoring best and worst marks can be done with math and not subjective judgement )

Removing high and low votes is a good idea. Also just removing obvious bad votes first is a good idea. Aka, it's not hard to see if someone voted 1 or 2 for every track and 10 for their track/their buddies track.

How about this:
Every player can give,
1 - 5p
1 - 4p
2 - 3p
3 - 2p
And the rest 1s
Must vote 1 on your own track.

This system is simple to understand, easy to check if done correctly and the risk of cheating is lowerd (to almost zero).
Bad side is that if there are many good maps you cant give all of them good points.

Just an idea that i think would work as i think that it would be better than the current system.

haenry says:
broadsword, I guess you mixed up lolig and me. I didn't suggest anything.

I did! Sorry about that, I don't know why I made that mistake. Corrected it now


When considering a new or altered system, simplicity and objectivity should be key. Right now, each judge rate the track from 1 to 10 (a common ranking system) according to his opinion and enjoyment. The judge also writes a comment explaining their score. We can hardly reach a simpler scoring process for the individual judge.

But we should also remember that outside of producing a winner, the results of these contests also fulfil another purpose on Mania-Exchange: having others review your track. In the scores, the creator can see how well the track was received and the comments (hopefully) offer more details on why these people felt how they did.

Thus, the creator can use this information to continue evolving as a trackbuilder. And since The Track Review Thread never have really taken off here at TM2-X, there are few other places for this kind of feedback for creators who have yet to be discovered by the community and have few comments/awards to get such information from.

Clearvision says:
How about this:
Every player can give,
1 - 5p
1 - 4p
2 - 3p
3 - 2p
And the rest 1s
Must vote 1 on your own track.

Utilising such a system would definitely even out scores, but as I said, that is not (at least not to me) the entire point of the MTC results. Because instead of receiving a score based on the individual track quality, you receive a score of how good the track was to each person when compared to the other tracks.

This score tells you virtually nothing about the track's quality since it gives no explanation to how good any track was - they could all be 3/10 to the judge, or they could be spread in the entire scale and your track could be considered an 8/10 without you knowing it. When it comes to scores relative the others, the final placement (and winners) will tell you that already.

And besides that, a system limiting the amount of high (or low) scores a judge can give is bad from a concept I'd like to call "credit where it's due". Consider for example a student being given a C because the teacher "has already given out all A's and B's to other students", regardless of how great this student is. I don't consider that to be a fair system, especially if you're looking for feedback on your track's proficiency.

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I tried to be brief, but it seems I'm as bad at that as eyebo Anyway, this was just my two cents on a slightly off-topic discussion on the thread of an MTC I neither partook in nor judged, so I'll be quiet now Congratulations to the (quite dramatic) winners, and to everyone: well built!

I would keep the system and ban troublemakers from the voting...