I was thinking, if Krin and Fai liked the idea, that it could be just like pick-a-door! When the contests end the admins could pick the top three designs from each species and put those as three of the doors and leave the fourth door for a 'skip' door in case the person doesn't like any of the three. If there happened to be a tie the admins would be the tie breakers. The doors would be open for a day to allow users from different time zones a chance to vote as well so they wouldn't have to be up super late.

While I see what you mean by comparing voting to pick a door in the way of players picking choices, I don't think pick a door would be the right comparison to go about it aha.

A simple voting feature would be suitable. Could include more than 3-4 pets (not to mention that there's so many species), and people don't have to vote if they don't want to (entirely optional, no prize for voting either if wanted).
The voting window can be open for maybe a week, to give everyone a chance to vote, but only one vote per species per player.

To specify even further, no names would be displayed, just the designs. (Sure, players can just backtrack by going back into the design thread and figuring out who designed what, but the point of voting is to pick a design, not the designer.)

Optional, show the results of the poll or not. (In my experience, I've seen many polls display the standings of each choice during the vote time. I don't really like it in my opinion, since crowdvoting (i.e. picking the design with most votes just because it has the most votes) could affect peoples' choices and skew the choices.)

It would be a bit to code, I guess, but there's differences between a voting system and the pick a door system. Pick a door does log who chooses what, but not for a polling sense. But I do get the comparison. xD;

I wouldn't think there should be a prize, because then people would vote to get something, not for the pets themselves. I 100% agree with NOT showing the poll results. Some people vote for the one that's got the most just because, and others would vote for the one that has the least out of sympathy or just to not be "mainstream". Not to mention how it would make the designers feel if theirs had the least. I didn't think it should go on for too long in case a festival had already been pushed back once or twice already. Maybe 2 or 3 days would be enough though? All in all though, you took my half baked idea and made it sound almost doable lol!

I'm sure voting on the designs was suggested or thought of before lol.

As for there being a "prize" for people voting, I feel like it kind of takes away from the total work that designers have. There's a psychological thing about being rewarded for doing a task, where they feel that they did it more for the reward than their actual input for whatever pet is up (external vs internal causes), and maybe people will just vote on whatever pet there is, just because there's a prize in it for them, instead of actually picking which one appeals to them. (Then again, it shouldn't be hard to pick a pet that actually looks nice out of the choices despite being rewarded, and I'm sure the reward from voting would be something tiny and not gamebreaking anyways. And the designers probably don't mind if the whole system awards the voters or not.)

The point of voting in essence is "for the pets themselves". It's the community picking what pets they'd like to see ingame, so it's more about the pets than the incentive. Providing incentive just to vote isn't gamebreaking, but I don't see it as necessary. A nice bonus, but not necessary if it comes down to the heart of the players. (I just have a thing to nitpick at the first sentence of what you said, mainly to keep it fair. It's as harmless as offering incentive to vote for your site on a site leaderboard, but I still think it could be a factor in swaying votes.)

And I suggested a week not so things would be delayed anymore, but because it's fair lol. There are players that might not log into Sylestia every day or want to decide on all the species on their own time (there's like...more than 10, and sometimes people would wanna sit down when they're not busy to pick). Seven days spans an entire week so players who have different free days (who works weekends? who works weekdays?) have a full week's window to vote, instead of 2-3 days. It kinda fits in with the timespan of how long festival features are left for other players to tie up loose ends (i.e. holiday shops close about 1 week after the festival officially ends). I can agree with a 3 day window if it has some sort of notice in advance (i.e. diamond sales that last 3 days or so tend to have a notice about it within a week of it opening, if not on the day it opens).

I actually think voting for designs would be more interesting if each player could choose a favorite design for each species, then Fai and Krin choose from the three most popular designs of each species. Maybe allowing the players to have 2-3 votes/species, so they can either divide the votes between designs that they like, or place all their votes one design if they REALLY like it.

I think the reward for the voters would be the creation of a themed pet that they really liked the color scheme of. And, of course, the designer would get the 2-vis themed.

Edit: Sorry, Flute, actually paid attention to what I was reading and realized you said much the same thing. Our only disagreement is in the number of votes allowed.

I believe this got suggested at some point in the past with a response about how that would make the theme selecting process simply take too long to be practical.

I'm personally against the idea, myself, simply because most people would likely just vote on the example given. The single picture or possibly two pictures that most people toss on the thread. That's a terrible way to pick a theme, as you don't know what it looks like in any other combination when you do that. Fai and Krin take their finalists (their short list they make from the thread, as mentioned in prior posts) into the generator and mess around with them to make sure they actually function in other combinations than just the examples given. I can't say I really trust every person on the site would be that committed, though!

While in theory this sounds good because of the community involvement aspect, even without displaying names it would be very easy for people to find out who the design belongs to. Then with that would come a whole slew of problems. The creators may ask for friends to vote for them, or even strangers. Perhaps offer an incentive to those who would vote for them, or if not the creator people who like them. Or the opposite, because a player is not well liked they may have their design passed over. There might also be advertising such as "Vote for Aeridini design #3!" There's no way for it to be impartial or secret.

I could only see this as a viable option if we were voting for admin created designs for a pet, because then while there still could be some colluding it would probably not be to the same extent.

Basically, I see this as nothing to gain and a lot to lose. Heck, even in the end the creators whose designs weren't picked may be angry at people for not pushing their design through.

If there were a way to make this private somehow, I'd be all for it. But there isn't a way to do that.

A possible way to do voting that *might* be fair is to let only the people who have a design on the short list to vote, and to only vote for species that their design is not in. But that would be very small scale and in my opinion, not even worth it in the first place.

TL;DR: I think this system could and would be abused, and the community involvement aspect wouldn't be worth it.

We pretty much strictly do not want the design "contests" viewed as actual contests. They are called contests due to a lack of a better word.

We don't want any competition involved in these contests as it would cause unnecessary drama and end up defeating the purpose of the contests which is just to simply have the community help give Fai and I ideas for new designs. =)