I like the idea of Big Bang Awards, it gives the film-making more meaning, but it could certainly be improved.
- First of all, it seems to me that for a competitive player, it's the best choice to just not vote at all. Every ballot you use is just giving someone else an advantage over you. Now, a fair voting process pretty much has to rely on non-selfish players to some extent, but this conflict of interest could be lessened. How about increasing your own film's appearance % by voting on other films? Of course, just doing one ballot mission is a lot less effort than completing an entire movie, so maybe it could give something like +1% appearance chance compared to a movie's +10%
- Alternatively, there could be a more fundamental change, but I think that would make the voting 100% fair and conflict-free: at the start of every week, split all Big Bang Awards participants into two equal-sized blocks. And so there would be two first places, two second places, and so on. The important thing would be, participants from block A would only get to vote on films from block B, and vice versa. That means they would never vote on someone they're competing with!
- The fact that there are only 2 films shown at a time is probably what makes randomness a huge factor in the voting. Seeing my finely crafted movie cover losing in the rankings wouldn't be nearly as sad if the winners actually looked good! But a lot of the time it's something completely generic taking the top spot. Here's just one thought: show more options on a ballot. How about 8 at a time, small covers you can get a closer look at by hovering over them like in the film history window. I think that would drastically increase the chance of a voter choosing a film because they actually liked it, and not because they had no choice.
- speaking of actually liking the covers... give an appearance % bonus to movie covers that have been customized. If a movie cover has been customized, then it's a lot more likely than its author actually cared about it looking good... which is the whole point of the competition!
So what do you think? Do you have any other ideas for making Big Bang Awards better?