How about, as an alternative or complement to role contests, that we have an "adventurer of the month" competition?

It would be like a popularity contest, IC hosted by the eternal star (which would give the heralds some events to tend to), but prizes are given out by imms.

The mechanics are easy: adventurerofthemonth <char name> casts your vote on a character. Most votes win.

Some basic restrictions would have to apply (both for voting rights and to be eligible), to prevent abuse:
1) Must be older than 50 hours
2) Must have logged atleast 20 hours during the current month
3) Cannot vote for cabalmates
4) A character can only win once
5) (edit) Comes indirectly from 'help rules', but might as well say it. Cannot vote for your own chars.

And a late addition/idea: Vote casting is transparent (everyone knows who voted on who). So you can trade votes and be machiavellian, and stuff.

1. OOC cheating. Mates voting for mates, taking turns to boost each other.
2. People with limited hours don't really get a look in. I admit, I am now one of these people hence my potential bias here. ;)

6) Cannot vote for a character that has a record of being played from the same IP as yours.

7) Minimum amount of votes to get elected. Also, minimum of total votes cast before election ends.

I would remove 1 and 2 as eligibility condition, but would retain them for voting rights.

I actually like the cycling imms reading roles, since each might run on a different theme or, as a reader, might prefer a different type.

But I definitely prefer a single person going in depth (supposedly) than a bunch of people turning it into a popularity contest.

>> But I definitely prefer a single person going in depth (supposedly) than a bunch of people turning it into a popularity contest.

Well that works fine with role contests, my issue with them is mainly that it's a competition regarding something that doesn't actually affect the game (except PBF reading).

This voting thing has a lot of good incentive drivers built in. Like making people want to market their chars, so they post logs and create content. It makes people arpee and built relations to get votes.

Perhaps something that could be tested?

>Like making people want to market their chars, so they
>post logs and create content. It makes people arpee and built
>relations to get votes.

Or a circle of OOC friends elects the winner amongst themselves.

I'm not saying it's not an issue. But,

1) It would take a quite big circle of friends to accomplish that (cf playerbase is around 1000 chars, let's guesstimate that 200 is old enough to vote, and 50% of them actually bothers to vote.) Just a few friends probably won't win it for you, though of course it can help. But a restriction that a player with multiple characters can only cast one vote on the same char would probably be good.

2) By having transparent voting (you can see who voted for who), it would be harder to get away with stuff like that (since most people like to take credit for their chars).

3) If people are going to cheat, there are many ways to get a much bigger advantage.

nt