Babylons Voting Guide
I saw some talk in the forums about how under utilized our tutorial section is, so I decided to write up a little voting guide to give some perspective to newer members- as well as something to link to when voting is asked about. Not going to drag this on endlessly, want this to be more of a friendly guide than a lecture, so lets jump right into explaining things.
• VP - Voting Power. Letsbeef uses a system of voting power to determine the outcome of battles, which is why the end-result is displayed with a percentage rather than simple numbers like "2 votes to 5 votes." Each member signs up with a baseline 2 VP, and casting a vote in someone's favor puts 2 vp in the pot for them. Mods/Admins have two more VP than regular users, so their votes can sway the outcome of a battle more than a regular member accounting for 4 VP each vote. When you drop unexplained, poor votes- your VP drops. Members who consistently drop poor votes can eventually have 0 VP, meaning their votes will not affect the outcome of ANY battles they vote on.
Now that I've broken down VP, I'll describe what in my opinion is the ideal stencil to apply while actually dropping votes for emcees on here. When voting you should constantly strive for understanding how to compare and contrast the abilities of the two battlers. You can streamline this by paying more attention to three key elements of the craft when deciding the winner of two battlers.
• Objectivity - This is the first one on the list for good reason, too often do people either consciously or subconsciously allow their bias towards a style or their bias towards a person guide their hand when voting. You should all but remove yourself from the equation when dropping a vote on here. There are a couple of mainlining factors I've found when voting that usually take precedence in peoples mind when voting, I'm going to be talking about audio here since that's what i'm familiar with. You should more be judging if the energy, content, and verse structure of the two emcees verses stack against each other than you should be judging irrelevant aspects of their character as an emcee. Be technical, this craft is technical.
• Description - Let someone know what impressed you about their material, and let them know what fell short in your eyes- but most importantly let them know WHY. We're all here battling SOLELY to get better, and that can be made 100x easier if we just started explaining to each other what we think about our respective styles.. Dont be afraid to speak your mind objectively, and if someone gets emotional based on your fair criticism? That is THEIR issue- not yours.
• Fairness - This ties into objectivity in a few minute ways, but needs its own bullet point nonetheless. You as a battler should feel responsible to take in each battlers material in an unbiased, neutral way. Don't let the fact that you might not like gun-bars blind you from someones material. Don't adhere to shitty ideological differences in how YOU think someone should be writing or delivering their material and instead vote mainly on how they did their thing in comparison to their opponent.
Remember that just like I have, you will fuck up and do each of these bullet points injustice at one point or another, simply because we're human- just try to strive for putting them in practice.