The Gameriot staff is on Christmas break and I would like to gather some information from you. I will be providing your feedback directly to the staff during a consultation to decide if changes need to be made to the contest before it closes.

Some of the users have suggested removing the "Vote Down" button. Also, how do you feel about masking the number of votes until the end of the contest? Would you like the voting period to be extended? And if so, how would you feel if your scores were reset if voting down was disabled? Any other feedback you can provide is appreciated.

The vote down button is probably the biggest concern at the moment as far as balance goes. It should be removed and if the votes are reset, having the voting period extended would be a good way to make up for time lost.

I feel the vote down button should definitely be removed, the votes reset, and the time extended by however much has already been. That means that there would be less potential for spamming, and a fairer competition. It may well still prove to be largely a popularity contest, but at least good entries won't be downgraded for no good reason.

Quoting for emphasis.

Fix this contest ASAP before it's too late.

Removing the vote down is probably a poor idea considering it's a competition and some videos just do not deserve to be up here.

It'd probably be a good idea to make it so you can only vote if you're a registered user though that way you can keep track and people can't proxy without creating new accounts (which is obvious).

By doing that no one would be able to spam their votes up or down.

i dont think people should have to make new accounts because then u cant get your friends to vote and that was the whole idea of the competition. And if u guys reset then my whole friend network that ive been like extending from friend to friend will all be for nothing... please dont reset ive been working really hard.

but i think the down button should be removed too i agree with that.

ok please investigate freakin cheating, mine was at 45 or something and as i was browsing the site it went down to -16 in like 2 seconds... Thats realllllly not cool. Im freakin working really hard and people just keep doing dumb stuff please ban them or something

Removing the negative vote would have to mean reseting the scores.  It would only be fair to everyone, there no telling how many up votes anyone has at this point.  But don't mask the votes, some people would need to know how many votes they would need to campaign for to win.

Actually I thought the idea of the competition was to make the best machinima you could involving the Blackbird, not to prove you had the largest friends list.