Polls for registered game owners?

[Jon8RFC]

With the ingenious things you devs have come up with for Factorio, I'm sure you can integrate into the forum a state that makes a forum user a "registered owner" or not, and then we, or you, can make polls for things. An appropriate situation which comes to mind is the proposed UI changes in today's FFF. To prevent fraudulent votes, a poll would only allows (or counts separately) votes from registered owners of the game.

I'd think, like me, you'd like to see actual votes for game-changing proposals rather than someone padding the vote count. It would be helpful if players propose a change that ends up being overwhelmingly desired, so you can put lesser ideas on the back burner.

[Aeternus]

Even though I have bought the game, I am not in favor of -any- kind of privileges resulting from that, other then enjoying the game. Having cash doesn't make you smarter after all.

[brunzenstein]

Even though I have bought the game, I am not in favor of -any- kind of privileges resulting from that, other then enjoying the game. Having cash doesn't make you smarter after all.

No pun intended - but I'm all for privileges for folks playing by the rules.
Its not the question of having cash or not but a question if one possesses a entity legally or stolen.
If you think it makes no difference: Thats what the core of communism was all about.

[Koub]

I don't think only people who have bought the game should have the right to express themselves. People who haven't boght the game yet should also have the right to make the game better with their ideas.
The people lurking in this forum are just a very tiny part of Factorio's playerbase. There are 40k users registered (a great deal of which are banned spambots). There are almost 900k owners just on Steam, I wouldn't be surprised the million copies has already been achieved.

[Jon8RFC]

Even though I have bought the game, I am not in favor of -any- kind of privileges resulting from that, other then enjoying the game. Having cash doesn't make you smarter after all.

Heh, I am in NO way prioritizing privilege by means of money or intelligence; I'm prioritizing legitimacy of votes. If someone wanted to upvote something they liked, they could make multiple forum accounts, have sleeper accounts, or use a myriad of approaches to upvote illegitimately.

Genuine votes (one per person) versus padded votes (multiple per person, or on behalf of a person) is why I suggest this. If you go the "only if your forum account age is greater than x or posts are greater than 280", it still readily allows fraudulent votes. People can still always comment or post threads and express their thoughts, but the ability to keep voting numbers legitimate would be helpful, as is the case with any and all polls. Legitimacy is important.

Now that I think about it, piracy is reason enough to weed people out, and anyone who pirated the game or offers it to others doesn't deserve a vote, and I feel confident that you'll agree. That would be a good show of support and moral compass that we believe that nobody should steal from, or take advantage of, the Factorio team.

I've been bugging two friends to play because I think they'd enjoy it, even if we didn't play multiplayer. Sure, I could just send them the new exe, give them VPN access to my connection, and play locally and they could begin posting idea suggestions and bug reports, but piracy is a "privilege" that I don't think anyone deserves, especially when the game is mostly funded by people who have ethics and a respectable moral compass. Pirates shouldn't be given a vote or the ability to play a game. I'd be glad to see that you support legitimate votes on the note of supporting the developers. Surely you won't still say that you think pirates should be able to vote on changes given that pirates would likely be voting, and likely post on the forum. The only way to prevent giving pirates privilege (who already broke both moral and ethical codes of conduct) is to only allow registered owners. If I say I support civil rights, it doesn't mean squat if I don't act on it...I support being in healthy shape, but it doesn't mean anything if I'm being a couch potato and eating fast food.

People can always post, and I'm not advocating stripping that from anyone, I'm merely advocating legitimization of votes to prevent fraud, but now also to prevent votes from pirates. If it's not that big of a deal, then I should be sending my friends the exe and they can both play, and vote, without having paid to play the game...which steals from not only the developers, but from people who honestly bought the game.

On the note of privilege, despite not having any particular needs myself:
viewtopic.php?f=7&t=46785#p272176

[Selvek]

Do you have any evidence of widespread voter fraud?

It just seems a little unlikely that enough non-owners of the game would care enough to cheat the system on polls that don't really affect anything...