Vote chess features

I enjoy this feature. I like the negotiation, and give and take. The only obvious problem is, as with any team competition, that sometime the team makes a move that is inferior move for a number of reasons.

I was wondering if a weighted average vote (a concept that a 2200 player's vote is worth more than a 1300 player's vote) could be considered, or even better, a team captain concept. Team captain compiles votes, considers analysis and actually makes the move for the team. Team captain would need to be elected before each game and would have to be a leader and a decision maker, not necessarily the best player, just a good administrator.

Good in theory but I think then the team would rely too strongly on the better players.

i agree. i also think that votes should be weighted according to IQ in the next presidential election. whether i am serious about that or not, we are going to leave it fully democratic. one voice, one vote.

what is the role of the team captain? 

Fully democratic systems do not work, and the USA presidential system is not a democratic system, it is a representative republic. We elect electors for President. This is the same concept. A team captain takes the votes and analysis submitted and makes the best move, not necessarily the most popular. That's what managers/captains do, make decisions.

 There are people/players whose votes should be worth more. I don't want a plumber making the final decision on a heart bypass operation. Same reasoning, a player that has a higher rating earned it and thusly, his vote should be worth more. A good plan is more than move to move. A captain would be able to make moves within a plan.

If it is too hard to program though, I understand. Just giving up is easier.

it isn't too hard to program :) but it isn't the vision we had for the product. i don't think people would be as excited about it if they felt that ultimately the decision would be made by somebody else. and you are right about politics - but at least we get the appearance of a true democracy :)

i think if we were trying to get the VERY best move possible then we would certainly have created the system you are calling for. but we instead created one where the masses decide. and as history has shown, the masses don't make the best decisions always, but it sure is more interesting to watch!

 I totally agree, the reason I love the vote chess is, i see moves that i think need to happen to force the game to go a certain way, but it may never get voted for, so you have to look again, and talk with your team, communicate and hopefully get the moves you want.

If it was a 'balanced' vote syste, i would assume it would generally be draw after draws.

 What could be good though, is maybe team games and/or alliences maybe face of diamond users v's the gold stary ones (what ever they're called :p)

Ok, so it is never intended to be the best chess possible, it is just a science experiments where the gerbils get to vote, kinda like American politics. Perfect, let's call it Gerbil chess. This green cheese is pretty, let's eat that. Wow, let's eat that pawn, gag, gag, choke, choke.

Well, if that's the case, make them rated games so the players are "invested" and maybe will at least try to make decent moves. Get gerbil rating points. Maybe even use it to sell better memberships, extra $1/month for gerbil chess.

These ideas are horrible and would take away all the fun from vote chess. The fun part is motivating the move you think is best and discuss possibilities with the team. If you can motivate your move then the team will vote for it.

The weighted votes idea wouldn't matter much. Each team got maybe 5-10 people that's high rated and a few 100 that's around 1000-1200. For a move to win you would still have to convince the low rated players that the move you want is the best.

The team captain idea is just horrible. Erik could just let the vote function dump the results directly to /dev/null and let the "team captains" play by themselves without anyone disturbing them. There are lots of places you can watch live chess, just go to one of those and pretend you're teamed up with a gm. It'll be really fun to win!

Spoken like a true chess player, independent, anti-social and not interested in the best results or the team building skills. Just check out the results of the existing games when the gerbils vote. Most of you, I think, are just move in between "tokes" anyway based on the votes I have seen.

Erik, that's another great idea, Pot-smokers vote chess! Neneko can "pot-head" that project up. Extra $1 per month per player, and naming rights which I give you as a good team building example. "Pot not included".

Sometimes I have the feeling that Vote Chess is less democratic, but more lemming style :)

A good example is the current "Rematc Old vs Young". We anticipated the next move of our opponents, had a strategy - but the first one to make a comment during the next move was screekdawg, a player with <1000.

No problem there, he just asked if his idea was as good as he expected. But the others simply followed, till someone later recognized the mistake and we managed to catch the bad move in time.

So when you keep this democratic vote mechanism, than give us at least some more informations. Add the rating to each commenters info box, give better access to comments from previous turns ( keep them "alive" on the current comments site, but mark / color them ).

Oh and on the public comment part I'd prefer to know who belongs to which team.

A player posting an idea is simply posting an idea.  Much like the American political process, it is up to each individual to evaluate the information and make a truly informed vote.  Also, much like the American political process, such informed votes are rare.  Where there are people voting, there are bound to be people voting based on limited information, knee-jerk reactions, and mob mentality.  This is the nature of the beast. 

Note: anyone who cares about the rating of a poster can easily check that player's profile.

Of course, like we'd waste 2 clicks & loads to inform ourselves about the posters ranking, when people even don't try to come up with their own thoughts when someone droped an "idea" before.

Besides that, a mentioned ranking should reduce the actual bitching style on some votes. USA vs the rest was a really joyful experience in this respect.