Dev Blog: A cap on votes per Cultivator

Wonderful Cultivators,

Moving forwards we are working hard to try and ensure communication between us as a studio and our players is as good as it can be. In an effort to further that we will be writing some blog posts about any feature updates that we feel require a little more context.

With update 0.3.3, we will be making changes to how many votes a single cultivator can cast in a society election / ballot. Here are some more details about the change and why we made it!

What changed?

In any voting process, the votes a single Cultivator can submit are now capped at 15% of the society’s total current Seedling population number. That cap never drops below 3.

For example -

Society of 12 Seedlings: cap is 3 votes (the minimum)
Society of 20: 3 votes
Society of 40: 6 votes
Society of 100: 15 votes

This cap will apply to every kind of vote or ballot a society can hold including elections, law suggestions, banishments, changes to the constitution and votes of no confidence.

This change in no way affects your Seedlings individually, you can still have as many Seedlings in play as you have slots and lives for, no Seedling has in any way been removed from the society or shut out, the only thing that has changed is of your total submitted Seedling votes, only the capped amount will register towards the result you are voting on.

To give a little example of how this would work. You have 8 Seedlings in a society that has a total population of 40 Seedlings. The cap for votes in this situation is 6 per Cultivator, so only 6 of your 8 submitted votes would count against the vote tally. This cap then grows with your population, so as your society reaches 47 Seedlings, all 8 of your votes now count against the tally again!

So why did we do this?

In SEED, we are simulating multiple societies, and it was important to us that each Seedling feels like their own living, breathing person. Your Seedlings live in Avesta and give it life, they hold the jobs, they build the businesses, they are the beings that are affected by life conditions in their society. As a result it was a deliberate design decision to give each Seedling a vote, each of their opinions should matter.

The trouble is, the system became easily exploitable. With votes counting per Seedling, a Cultivator with enough Seedlings can sway any vote in their favour. We saw this happen a few times! Based on the feedback of our players we decided that a change had to be made to provide some protection from this being used to disrupt the societies you have all been working hard to establish and grow.

It was clear something had to be done, and we considered a few ways to tackle the problem in a way that was fair and still in line with our vision for SEED and the importance of each individual Seedling. We considered votes being allocated per cultivator, we considered letting society leaders set limits on votes and a few other things. Putting a cap on votes was a simple change that went in the right direction whilst giving us the time to work on a better solution down the line.

What comes next?

This is designed to be a step in the right direction rather than a full, long term solution to the problem. We want to deliver something that is closer to a citizenship, a Seedling arrives and works to contribute to a society and that society has processes in place to assess its population and allocate voting rights with citizenship, so that you feel like you have grown with and actively contributed to a society and then have a say in how it changes over time.

Something like this is a large undertaking and will take some time to get in place in a way thats appropriate and fun. Until something like that is ready, let us know how this change impacts your society, how it plays out over time and if we need to change or adapt we will!

Catch you on Avesta!

Thanks as always,

Klang