I resent that. The mk IV on it isn't by accident; I spent a ton of the moratorium putting it together and soliciting feedback from people, which I then incorporated because other folks had great ideas and criticisms. The reason I made it in the first place was that a bunch of people asked for a grab-bag option to vote for but didn't want to make it themselves because it turns out that thinking of eight moderately cool things is harder than thinking of one very cool thing! It wasn't even the thing I spent most of the vote campaigning for, but it's the thing I put the most work into because it took work. You've known me for long enough to know what I'm like when it comes to planmaking. I responded to all the feedback I got over the course of the long moratorium and then went to bed. I don't know what else I could have done other than "have better ideas during the moratorium".
Like. I understand the feeling of "ugh, just not that," when looking at the tally, because I felt that way while the airship was winning, and other people have posted at length about how they feel that way about the armor. It sucks. I don't have a solution to this. I know a lot of people felt that way about the library five years ago, because they said so and it was accordingly delayed until end-of-arc, but at least that time there was only one thing with any sort of momentum behind it, not three wildly different ones. I'm not exactly proud to have put together something that seems to have as its primary selling point "is least hated," but I'm not apologizing for it either, and I gave it all the baking that people could help me with before the vote went live.
I'm sorry. I was being thoughtless, it was wrong, and you didn't deserve that.
I took my frustration - and frustration with things completely unrelated to this quest - and let some of it spill onto you. I'll try to do better next time - for now I've struck that paragraph out from the original post.
But I'll be damned if I acknowledge knife fighting as a feature rather than a bug. Vote discussion should be about developing and comparing ideas, not fighting over the forum equivalent of Search Engine Optimization.
Since I got carried away with that post (It's 1:41 am oh my god), I forgot to mention one important thing:
I am not arguing for the vote to suddenly be closed. If there was a time for closing the vote to be a relief valve, that was weeks ago - as of right now...
'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.
...by another mysterious unspoken movement of players in the vein of a poll falling silent in favor of general thread talk, people are coming back to clarify and re-evaluate their positions.
And, well, on the whole of it I suppose that's a good thing. The more people who turn their eyes here and take notice, the more likely the result will be representative.
I maintain that knife fighting is a bug. But it is also a multidimensional and mostly unsolved problem, at least in the context of forum questing. Maybe we'll learn something about it from here, but while it's a common safeguard to
have scheduled vote ends so no matter what the knives eventually get put down, it's not universal, and it has its own trade-offs.
I don't expect you to have all the answers, Boney. And I definitely didn't mean to try and make you feel bad. This isn't about blame.
But as the time of night and my first reply in this post should indicate, I'm clearly not in a good state of mind to articulate what it should be about, either.
It felt off. Best way I can put it, I guess.
