I feel this is a callous position to take, considering the honest and vulnerable discussions of voting anxiety happening around us.
It is a quest master's job to create a fun and inviting environment for play. It is the players' job to be aware and respectful of each others' needs and desired level of engagement - including how and why that can differ from their actual level of engagement.
Anybody who says that the subject of the immortal XKCD #386 likes that he is putting off going to bed is fooling themselves. Providing incentives for people to argue perpetually is not a good thing, no matter how many times you say "just don't then". We're only having this discussion because some people were rewarded for resuming the argument.
What speaks louder? Backhanded advice to just care less, or victory?
Say, for the same of argument, that I've made a quest that people are invested enough in that they'll feel anxious or upset if an important vote goes in a direction they don't like. As you've just said yourself, a narrow margin of victory is a common thing, which not only exacerbates those feelings, it also maximizes the amount of people that will end up on the wrong end of them. It seems like at this point, it is no longer possible for this to be a universally fun and inviting environment. What's my 'job' here, then?
Sorry if this comes across as unkind, but this is how questing
works. The possibility of influencing the result is inextricable from the possibility of not succeeding. The field of conflict is a social one, and the foibles of the human mind are the terrain. This cannot be worked around because it
is the work. The debates and the discussions are not the unfortunate chore from which the direction of the story arises,
it is the game. You can play the game by deciding what you think the best option is and adding your one vote to it. You can play it by discussing the matter to try to synthesize the available data into easily-digestible facts so that people can more easily arrive at a better thought out solution. You can champion a particular cause and make your debates for it. You can sit on the sidelines and just watch the game go back and forth. But this
is the game. That is why I leave it open as long as possible, so that it can go on.
If you see playing that game as the price you pay to win, instead of as the game we all get to play together, then I can see how that will feel unfair - that I'm extracting more of a 'cost' than usual, that you 'have to' spend so much time on the field to 'pay for' your 'victory'. But that's not what this is. If you treat it like it is, it will hurt you. And as I spelled out two paragraphs ago, there's nothing I can do to stop that from hurting you. If people care, and what they care about is that the right option wins, then this becomes an engine of suffering, where people are fighting to try to make it so that it's others suffering this vote, not them. And that
can't be what this quest is. That would be a poison that would taint everything we've built here.
It's closer to the canal or the gunpowder factory when the reward is players wanting to feel like we had a positive impact on the setting.
It is important for the setting that it is a place where things like this can be rewarded.
Eh, maybe, maybe not. I've been around the block a lot, but I'm not lying when I say that this is a corner case - it is not easy to find examples of a vote being open this long and then suddenly swinging. There are no patterns to point to, no rules of thumb to describe what is happening.
Which is also why I'm concerned about whether or not it correlates to a change in overall player desires, because it being uncharted territory puts that into question, too. How sure are we that we're improving our measurement of the playerbase's sentiment?
You probably have more experience with votes on this website in total, but I don't think you follow the vote-by-vote of this one as closely as I do. And I have seen
attempts at making long-open votes swing back many times. I've seen them gather some initial momentum and then fizzle out under the already-established arguments and inertia of people having made their decisions. There is a pattern, and I am pointing to it, and that pattern is that this usually does not happen.
The thing about a swing happening after people's "guard" is down is more than just about winning or losing, it's about attentiveness period. A major development in thesis and rhetoric now is just... who's there to see it? Who's there to criticize or pick it apart? Is it really new, or something old that was independently thought up and articulated?
Who is engaged? It's... I mean, not necessarily random, but this is rare enough of a situation that to me it may as well be.
All of the pomp and circumstance that normally surrounds a vote... the thought leaders, the surrogates, the Q&A, not all of it is still there and present, because nobody has called them here. Until you look inside, the thread looks identical to how it does when the vote is dead.
If you start digging up this rabbit hole, the first thing you'll uncover is the undeniable fact that the time I post an update determines which posters are ready, willing, and able to immediately respond and set the tone for the discussion. The randomness is always there. If there's an alternative, it's worse.
As the person who made the airship vote that was winning for around a month and a half, I do have to say it does kinda suck just a bit. The momentum had died off on the vote, and IIRC my plan had a 15-20 vote lead or so for a while, and I didn't want to poke the vote more than I needed to, because I felt that if I was too defensive, I might end up setting myself up to a strong counterargument. I kinda wanted to quietly wait for the vote to end.
But then the vote kept going on, and people kept voting, and every so often I'd keep having to defend my dear airship and try to find other angles to convince people as to why it's cool and deserves a vote beyond it being an airship.
I humbly implore you, in your capacity as QM, to either end the vote, or at least set a time limit on it. I think it's fine if we don't get an update (and in fact I think I'd be fine with you explicitly going "the vote may be closed but the update will be out when it's ready, don't hold your breath"), but if the vote continues getting stretched out in this limbo, this cycle will just repeat itself. Another vote will take the lead and we'll either defend it or argue against it, but it won't be resolved.
If you really think having consensus is important, and that if there isn't a sizable lead you can't close it, then couldn't you at least say that the reward is getting postponed until the arc ends or something?
'Stretched out in this limbo'. 'This cycle will repeat itself'.
There are 35 more votes in the tally now than there was three days ago.
If you'll excuse me for reading into your phrasing, this has hurt you, and you want it to stop because you now think of it as something that hurts, and that is the most understandable thing in the world. But as I laid at the start of this post, you can't turn this quest into a machine that hurts you and then make me responsible for minimizing the hurt it does to you. Nobody is trapped in this thread. If the way it currently is hurts you, don't be in it right now. There will be another update as soon as I become able to make it exists, and it's easy to check from the outside whether that has happened yet or not.
