It has been said before, but imo the only fair way to resolve this and encourage voting is to give 1 point per 1 vote and only then give bonus points depending on rankings.
Let me put this in terms you people might actually get your heads around. Top 100 Arena - the site that only gives you vote points if you actually vote and it actually counts - we are ranked 3rd here by a clear margin over the 4th as well.
XtremeTop100 we're ranked 18th, if you voted a full 14 times in the week that is worth a small number of points. Get it up to 10th and it's worth about 15 points. Get it up to 3rd place like Arena and it's worth a whopping 30 points (approximately).
On MMORPG Toplist we're 28th, this is not worth any points. Get up to 10th and it's worth about 15 points, get it up to 3rd and it comes out at around 30 points just like Xtreme.
We managed over 6000 votes in one week on ArenaTop100. This is the site that lets you vote half as much as the other two, and apparently doesn't even let a bunch of people vote at all (if you're having problems with it, talk to the guys at ArenaTop100 there's nothing we can do by the way, it's not our site). On Xtreme this week we got less than a third of that number of votes, and on MMORPG Toplist we got even less. You can vote twice as often on these sites why are the voting numbers so low? I checked the logs for the last week the captcha here on our site for MMORPGToplist was filled out over 14 thousand times and we got about 1300 votes. So if all you people sitting around saying you voted 10 times for these sites aren't actually lying then for every one of you there's roughly 9 other people trying to cheat.
I don't think it's unreasonable to expect people to stop trying to cheat the system - you have proved that we can be ranked 3rd if you try (and we don't give you anything if you don't), unfortunately since XtremeTop100 and MMORPGToplist don't provide any mechanisms for us to do the same we have to resort to rewarding everybody for good performane, and of coruse the other side - everybody shares in the lack of rewards when performance is terrible as it is right now. We don't want to have to do it this way but we don't seem to have any other choice.
To put it in the simplest possible terms that hopefully everybody will understand - if people stop trying to cheat the system (something that you all can encourage people in, and don't you dare say you can't be bothered or it's not your job) and we get into the top 10 on these sites then articles like this would never appear. Everybody - you most of all - would be more than happy at the number of votes / points being awarded.
Like I've said in my previous posts on the subject, if you have a better idea on how to deal with the problem of people trying to get vote points without voting properly then send it in to us. We don't like when you aren't happy with the number of vote points, but we also don't like that a huge percentage of the people who are "voting" (notice the airquotes) are trying to cheat the system and give us absolutely nothing in return for their points. (Add _______ to the vote shop is NOT a valid suggestion in this case, remember).
I'd like to finish up with a quote from the bug tracker which was sent in back in May, and also a reply from page 1 of this thread:
Yo know well all know not every one votes on NE
A Bug Tracker Post said...
i know that you already know this, but many people, some close friends included, are typing in the captcha on the NE site, and closing the vote page, without actually voting. however, they get the points. this is unfair to you guys, who try so hard to make this site the best.
You all know that people aren't voting properly. Help yourselves by talking to your friends and your guildmates - make sure they know how to vote correctly and are doing so. Make sure that everybody you know understands that it's in their best interest to have their votes count as it's not only in their best interest it's in yours as well. This isn't about the number of people voting - I'm not telling you to go out and encourage people to actually start voting (Although you are more than welcome to, more people voting will, in theory, lead to more votes if they do it correctly) because ArenaTop100 shows that the number of people voting should be more than sufficient to put us in 3rd place on all the sites if people would actually vote properly so it counts.
We want to give you points. Get us ranked higher so that we can.