As we know, the August event is going to be unranked due to serious cheating/majority community vote. What I am concerned about is the next LD in December. I’m assuming that at some point, we are going to have to reimplement a voting system to have a more competitive feel to Ludum Dare.

The current system can be broken quite easily with people voting for games they played little/none of. Fake accounts are also a huge problem as they can not easily be found and can be replicated very fast. I’ve seen streamers who give all their viewers 5-star ratings simply because they were watching the stream.

We need a more secure voting system that doesn’t allow this to happen. I have a couple of ideas:

A download-coolness system

A coolness rating would be given for downloads/web-link-clicks instead of how many votes you have cast out.

This could then be extended to check if the user has spent at least 5 minutes (or any time) after pressing download before they vote.

An anonymous system

This system would make it so that you cannot use a URL to access a game, you cannot use the search bar to find a game and the creator of the game remains anonymous. (But after the event, all the above is allowed.)

The only way to play games would be on the random/most coolness page. This would make it so fake accounts cannot easily find a game they want to rate, making the entire process much harder and slower.

But these are just some of my ideas, let me know if you have any of your own.