Voting Instructions

[Augustus Lucifer]

This thread explains how you can vote in this year's awards. If you want more in-depth information, like why the voting methods have changed, see this thread. But read this first so you don't have information overload. If you got here by announcement and don't know how to get back, 'The TWC Modding Awards' should be the very top forum on the main forum index, so it's hard to miss it.

How to create your voting ticket

Step 1. Start a new thread in the Cast Your Votes! sub-forum, titled 'My Ticket', or whatever you want to call it.
Step 2. Access the voting template, scroll to the bottom and quote the post.
Step 3. Copy-paste the template into your thread, without the quotes or the text above the dotted line.
Step 4. Post your thread. It's okay that it starts with no selections, you'll fill it in by editing it over time.
Step 5. Follow the guidelines below to fill in your votes. You may edit your ticket at any time during the voting period, which will conclude on January 31st.

Guidelines for making your selections

• You can click on the category in the template to be taken to the eligibility requirements for that category. Only votes for eligible mods or modders will be counted, and all work must have taken place in the 2009 calendar year.
  
  
• From the eligibility requirements, you can click to go to the Work Compilation thread for that award. This thread will have indexed links to any mods/modders that choose to display their work, as well as quick links to forums where you can find other mods.
  
  
• To vote for a mod or modder, enter their name in place of where it says {{Empty}} for that category. Link to the mod or modder if the name is not distinctive. Don't abbreviate or use nicknames.
  
  
• You do not have to vote in every category in order for your ticket to be counted. In fact it's preferred if you only vote for categories you're familiar with or can familiarize yourself with, so as not to cast any 'junk votes'.
  
  
• If you do choose to vote in a category, you must fill all three slots in that category with separate selections, or your votes *may* not be counted in that category. See the FAQ for a more detailed explanation of why this is.
  
  
• Position matters. The voting template has '1.', '2.', and '3.'. This is the order of your selections. Your #1 selection will receive more 'points' towards that category than your #2 or #3 selections, so order them appropriately.
  
  
• Most importantly, you can vote for ANY mod or modder who meets the eligibility requirements for that category. There is no shortlist of mods, and no list to choose from. You should view the compiled work, but you don't have to vote only for those mods.

Minimum Voter Requirements

1. More than 50 posts.
2. Registered before December 25th, 2009.
3. Not an alternate account of a pre-existing member.

Extra Voting Rules

1. Do not solicit votes. This includes but is not limited to: asking people to vote for you or your mod or someone else or someone else's mod, offering incentive for voting, directly influencing votes by association, and drafting pre-filled tickets. Anyone found to be soliciting votes will have all of their votes invalidated, possibly notes or infractions against their account, and/or other measures. Anyone found to be corroborating vote solicitation may receive similar action. Please report any and all attempts at solicitation to Aradan, Augustus Lucifer, GrnEyedDvl, or Trajan.
2. Do not commit vote fraud. This includes but is not limited to: voting with multiple accounts. Any members found to be committing vote fraud will have their alternate accounts banned, their votes invalidated, possibly notes or infractions against their account, and/or other measures. We do know when alts are being used, and we will catch it, so don't do it.

FAQ

Am I missing something or do most categories not have even a single candidate?

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Everyone is a candidate. Think of it like this. We'll look at one category and go through a list of folks. '[Medieval II] Favourite Unit Texture Artist' is our category. Now we can vote for anyone who meets the eligibility requirements. Those are:

• Modder must have done modding for Medieval II: Total War or expansions, and showcased work must be from those platforms.
• Modder must have done work in the field of texturing.

So we'll think, can we vote for 'Ferrets54'? We consider if he meets the eligibility, and since he hasn't done modding for M2 or expansions the answer is no. How about a texture artist. Can we vote for 'Halie Satanus' in the M2 category? Well he meets requirement #2, but his work is on Rome, so he isn't eligible in the M2 section. How about 'GrnEyedDvl', he's a prominent M2 modder. But he hasn't done textures, so he's not eligible either. On the other hand, if we look at the work compiling thread for this award, we can see a list of 5+ folks who meet the requirements and wanted to show off some work for consideration.

Those aren't the only people we can vote for, but it gives us a start. Then we take our two criteria and hit the hosted mod forums to look for other skins we like, find out who textured them, and we can vote for them. It's really that open. As long as the requirements are met, your vote will count for that person. The only 'unwritten' rule, is that work has to be from the 2009 calendar year, since these are the 2009 awards rather than the all-time awards. Most users who could pull votes would inherently meet this requirement. Hope that explains it, and remember you have until the 31st to modify your choices so there really is no rush to choose right.

Why do we have to vote for 3 selections in a category? What if I only like one mod?

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

You should make 3 selections for all categories you vote in to create vote spread. By mandating that 3 selections be made, we are allowing users who have lots of mods they like to be able to vote for multiple, and we are encouraging users who aren't familiar with a lot of mods to broaden their horizons. By doing so, we insure at least to some extent that voters must educate themselves in casting their votes, above and beyond whatever singular mod they might gravitate to. Informed voting does a service to the mods and modders who may not have external factors which make their mods inherently 'popular', but still produce outstanding products and deserve your consideration.

The awards attempt, to the best of their ability, to celebrate all that is good in the modding community. By allowing the public to vote rather than a panel of experts, we're entrusting you with deciding who gets a prominent accolade. In doing so however, we want to make sure that all mods get their shot, or we would be doing our valuable modders a disservice. If all we wanted was to lump awards on whatever the most 'popular' mod is, we could do that by gauging forum activity and downloads, defeating the purpose of these awards entirely.

So keep that in mind when formulating your ticket, and if you have to not vote in a couple of categories so you can spend time filling up all the categories you did vote in, that's fine.

See this post for an extrapolation about possible exceptions to this rule.
See also this post for more notes about exceptions.

How come it seems like I'm the only one voting? My thread is the only one in there... -or- Won't people be able to see who I voted for?

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Special permissions have been used in the voting forum which prevent you from seeing threads that other people have made. There could be 1 or 100 threads in the forum, but you should not be able to see any besides your own. The only exceptions to this are Senior Moderators, Administrators, and members of the Consilium Belli, for obvious reasons. If none of those distinctions apply to you and you can see other users threads in that forum, please let us know since that should not be happening.

How come a non-admin posted all these threads? Is this competition really site-sponsored?

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

The Modding Awards have traditionally been run by the 'CB', or Consilium Belli, a body tasked with overseeing affairs of the Total War side of the site, including these annual awards. While the majority of users on the CB are also Hexagon Council Administrators at this time, both Augustus Lucifer and B. Ward are examples of Councilors who are not admins. These awards are completely site-sponsored and all postings were screened by administrators before being made public.

(Modders) Oh snap! The voting started and I didn't post my work compilation. Can I still post it?

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Yes. Work Compilation can be posted up until the close of the voting. Obviously the sooner you post it the more exposure you'll get, but if you want to post it 5 seconds before the awards close entirely, we won't stop you. Make sure you read the announcement thread though, because it explains work compiling, which isn't covered here because this thread is geared towards voters.

To see more FAQ answers not related to the voting itself, but concerning the competition in general, see here.

If you have any questions, any questions at all, ask them in this thread and they will be addressed as those of us running the competition can get around to it. Thank you, and have a nice day.

[Sunbird Alkibijad]

Whatever you have tried to accomplish with these, hits the wall and receives a serious dissaproval...If for nothing, then for the total lack of proper information on what all this is about.

1. "templates" ...huh? ...
2. what to "vote" for? ...
3. this is a huge amount of text, and I can only wish you good luck, because if anyone wishes to get any awards for modding, he will have to do some serious campaigning and people to dedicate to these threads.

Whatever these "tickets" are, is something you should have pre-made and had it as some sort of PM or other kind of message and provide us with choices. Like the elections.

Good night, and good luck.

[Augustus Lucifer]

Whatever you have tried to accomplish with these, hits the wall and receives a serious dissaproval...If for nothing, then for the total lack of proper information on what all this is about.

The Modding Awards are an annual competition held by TWC to reward modifications and modders in a variety of categories. I'm not sure what's unclear about that.

1. "templates" ...huh? ...
2. what to "vote" for? ...
3. this is a huge amount of text, and I can only wish you good luck, because if anyone wishes to get any awards for modding, he will have to do some serious campaigning and people to dedicate to these threads.

A 'template' is a preset format you can utilize to list votes within so that different users don't have to do it themselves in different ways. You vote for whichever mods you feel fulfills the eligibility requirement for each category -- which are linked to from the category headers in the template -- and deserves to win. Of course, that would all be explained in the huge amount of text, which isn't huge at all.

Whatever these "tickets" are, is something you should have pre-made and had it as some sort of PM or other kind of message and provide us with choices. Like the elections.

That would have defeated the purpose of an awards ceremony open to the community at large if we told you who you could vote for. Part of the new format is to allow users to determine who they think deserves it without having to be restricted to a set list of options.

Is it as easy as voting in a poll? No. Is it difficult? No. As I've said before, making a mod is difficult, filling a ticket over a period of two weeks is leisurely by comparison. If there's anything I can do to make it easier on users, I'll do it. The amount of guiding and providing already done so users don't have to is massive though, and I really don't think our expectations are unrealistic for our fine community.

And if there's questions, I'm here to answer them to the best of my ability. I really don't know what else I can do.

[juvenus]

Hi,
I'd like to vote and I'm wondering whether I can delete those "voting categories" which I don't want to vote in and leave only those which I do want to vote in?
Thanx

[Ratbag]

Am I missing something or do most categories don't even have a single candidate?

[Anibal at portas]

thanks for your notice.
explain us how to vote.

[Ostrogoth]

explain us how to vote, I don't get it.

[Augustus Lucifer]

Hi,
I'd like to vote and I'm wondering whether I can delete those "voting categories" which I don't want to vote in and leave only those which I do want to vote in?
Thanx

Yup. Feel free to delete any categories you don't wish to vote in.

thanks for your notice.
explain us how to vote.

explain us how to vote, I don't get it.

The first thing to do would be follow the 5 steps in 'how to create your voting ticket'. Once you have a thread with a blank ticket in it, then you'd want to look at the 'Guidelines for making your selections'. Those two descriptions explain how you can vote. If you have any questions about any specific bullet point or step, I can elaborate.

[Augustus Lucifer]

Am I missing something or do most categories don't even have a single candidate?

Everyone is a candidate. Think of it like this. We'll look at one category and go through a list of folks. '[Medieval II] Favourite Unit Texture Artist' is our category. Now we can vote for anyone who meets the eligibility requirements. Those are:

• Modder must have done modding for Medieval II: Total War or expansions, and showcased work must be from those platforms.
• Modder must have done work in the field of texturing.

So we'll think, can we vote for 'Ferrets54'? We consider if he meets the eligibility, and since he hasn't done modding for M2 or expansions the answer is no. How about a texture artist. Can we vote for 'Halie Satanus' in the M2 category? Well he meets requirement #2, but his work is on Rome, so he isn't eligible in the M2 section. How about 'GrnEyedDvl', he's a prominent M2 modder. But he hasn't done textures, so he's not eligible either. On the other hand, if we look at the work compiling thread for this award, we can see a list of 5+ folks who meet the requirements and wanted to show off some work for consideration.

Those aren't the only people we can vote for, but it gives us a start. Then we take our two criteria and hit the hosted mod forums to look for other skins we like, find out who textured them, and we can vote for them. It's really that open. As long as the requirements are met, your vote will count for that person. The only 'unwritten' rule, is that work has to be from the 2009 calendar year, since these are the 2009 awards rather than the all-time awards. Most users who could pull votes would inherently meet this requirement. Hope that explains it, and remember you have until the 31st to modify your choices so there really is no rush to choose right.

[Sunbird Alkibijad]

Am I missing something or do most categories don't even have a single candidate?

You are probably supposed to go over entire TWC modding accomplishments and put the candidates up yourself, seems someone didn't feel like doing it the way the voting should be organized.

But as C.C.P. (developers of EVE online) have a habit of saying when 500-600 people complain about humongous amounts of lagg at once, you might expect something of an answer in this shape "Our logs show nothing wrong"

[Augustus Lucifer]

You are probably supposed to go over entire TWC modding accomplishments and put the candidates up yourself, seems someone didn't feel like doing it the way the voting should be organized.

But as C.C.P. (developers of EVE online) have a habit of saying when 500-600 people complain about humongous amounts of lagg at once, you might expect something of an answer in this shape "Our logs show nothing wrong"

Everyone is a candidate. You don't have to put anyone up because everyone is a candidate if they meet the eligibility requirements. Why is forcing you to vote for a few select mods and ruling out other mods that should get a shot the "way voting should be organized"? Ideally a user will have played enough mods that they don't really need to go hunting for selections. Worst comes to worst all it takes is mousing over to a forum of a mod you recall being good, or skimming through a few previews.

[makanyane]

Why do we have to vote for 3 selections in a category? What if I only like one mod?

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

You must make 3 selections for all categories you vote in to create vote spread. By mandating that 3 selections be made, we are allowing users who have lots of mods they like to be able to vote for multiple, and we are encouraging users who aren't familiar with a lot of mods to broaden their horizons. By doing so, we insure at least to some extent that voters must educate themselves in casting their votes, above and beyond whatever singular mod they might gravitate to. Informed voting does a service to the mods and modders who may not have external factors which make their mods inherently 'popular', but still produce outstanding products and deserve your consideration.

If you can't bring yourself to vote for more than one mod, then these awards probably aren't for you. The awards attempt, to the best of their ability, to celebrate all that is good in the modding community. By allowing the public to vote rather than a panel of experts, we're entrusting you with deciding who gets a prominent accolade. In doing so however, we want to make sure that all mods get their shot, or we would be doing our valuable modders a disservice. If all we wanted was to lump awards on whatever the most 'popular' mod is, we could do that by gauging forum activity and downloads, defeating the purpose of these awards entirely.

So keep that in mind when formulating your ticket, and if you have to not vote in a couple of categories so you can spend time filling up all the categories you did vote in, that's fine.

OK so if I want to vote on M2TW tools and personally think that Squid and KnightErrant are only viable candidates for 'tools released in 2009'... could you please explain what I should put as third option to avoid vote being voided / me putting Ferrets in as 3 and him actually getting it, or that voiding the vote .....

whilst wanting to support a few people - there's kind of a limit to the amount of digging through possible others I'm prepared to do just to fill in some of the more obscure gaps....

and some gaps especially going back to the older games are getting quite obscure, favourite mod per game is pretty easy to come up with 3 alts for, but not necessarily others.

[Augustus Lucifer]

OK so if I want to vote on M2TW tools and personally think that Squid and KnightErrant are only viable candidates for 'tools released in 2009'... could you please explain what I should put as third option to avoid vote being voided / me putting Ferrets in as 3 and him actually getting it.....

whilst wanting to support a few people - there's kind of a limit it the amount of digging through possible others I'm prepared to do just to fill in some of the more obscure gaps....

and some gaps especially going back to the older games are getting quite obscure, favourite mod per game is pretty easy to come up with 3 alts for, but not necessarily others.

Some exceptions can be made for instance if there aren't more than 2 eligible candidates for an award, and that will be assessed when the processing phase is handled. For that particular category, here's a list of all the eligible tools I can find, alphabetically:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

ATVTW
Creating a World - Adding a Culture Template
EDB Validator
EDU-Matic
Excel Trait Generator
FPS Booster
Geomod Tool
GrnEyedDvl's Script Replicator
Integrated World Terrain Editor
Name Verifier
World Collision Editor 1.2
World Editor 0.9
World Pathfinding Editor
World Terrain Editor

It's the authors which are up for the award, but I listed it tool by tool since that's what is being assessed. I probably missed a couple. All I did was do a search for threads with the [Tool] prefix in the M2 Workshop, as well as go through the 'Downloads' section in the Tools category.

But as I said, if we find that users can't fill three slots due to a lack of visible candidates, that will be taken into account. The rule is there to prevent for instance a ticket which says "Awesomo TW" in every mod category and "Billy Bob (Creator of Awesomo TW)" in every modder category, and nothing else. Within reason we will assess if the lack of a filled category is due to a lack of effort to find a perfectly broad field of candidates, or a rather slim field of candidates that are reasonably difficult to find.

[Sunbird Alkibijad]

Everyone is a candidate. You don't have to put anyone up because everyone is a candidate if they meet the eligibility requirements. Why is forcing you to vote for a few select mods and ruling out other mods that should get a shot the "way voting should be organized"? Ideally a user will have played enough mods that they don't really need to go hunting for selections. Worst comes to worst all it takes is mousing over to a forum of a mod you recall being good, or skimming through a few previews.

Apologies for not putting it down clearly.

I have played several mods. I liked them, mostly. I want to play several mods in development, too, and I already like what I am seeing.
Now...

90% or more of the TWC population has very little or almost no knowledge about the modding work and the amount of work the members of dev teams have put into it, nor who those members are and which one takes the biggest credits, or which one's work they actually appreciated in the mods they played.

So. Instead of simply listing the mods/modders that are eligible for voting in their respective group, and simply giving us option to check the ones we want ...
= like tale of the week, picture of the week, and other such competitions give us the option to =

...you want people to go through an entire process, completing some ticket or whatever, only to find after a while that people/mods they wanted to vote for, were found INELIGIBLE... or even better : "dear member, thank you for wasting your time, but we found you misspelled the name of your candidate, thus, your ticket has been moved to section "toilet paper" ".

Why make it simple, when you can simply make it impractical...

But if you feel like creating tickets, I would be more than willing to send you a name/names of mods, modelers and other developers in teams that I would vote for, and you can do it for me, k? No? See?

Sorry for being sarcastic in the end, it gets the better of me, but I hope this gives you a clear image of why those 90% of us have clicked on that "dismiss" or whatever was the option on the commercial for the "modding awards 2009"(or 2010?), after just a few moments of reading the instructions on how to vote.

But best of luck with the voting anyway.

[Augustus Lucifer]

Accessibility issues are something that will need to be worked on with future modding awards. However there's nothing that can be done to alleviate any of the things you suggest, and reverting to a previous format is not the direction we want to head in. We'd rather improve this format or devise an even better one.

So yes, there's going to be folks who just don't know enough to fill a ticket, even for one category. And that's fine, we don't expect every member to participate. If we get 100 voters, which we're on pace to get, that will be more than we've had in years previous, and many times the amount of people who voted in the Scriptorium Competition(which was polls and all the work was right there). In fact, if we get modders to vote for other modders and people who aren't as familiar decide not to bother, that would simply make the votes that are cast more well-informed and representative.

And anyone who has questions is more than welcome to ask. We tried to document and format and do a lot of legwork so it was easy to navigate for voters. We will try and clear up any issues people have as well.

In regards to ineligibility, I don't expect that to come up very often. The eligibility requirements try to be concise and easily discernible. It might come up with work finished prior to the 2009 calendar year, but that will not be very much I'd think. And even then it would only discount that one vote, so if it's the first-listed mod that's ineligible the second-listed would move up a spot and be counted, same with the third. If anyone is unsure whether a mod is eligible they're more than welcome to ask.

We also will try our best to find out who or what a vote is referring to. If you vote for 'Knig Kong', it probably won't be tossed. But we ask that if you really want to make sure you link to them, because we can only be expected to know what you're referring to within reason, and after that it's nice if we're met half way. Same goes for acronyms. I'm not going to toss out a vote for 'RTR', because I happen to know what it means. However, when you post that you're making the assumption that I or another person assessing the votes knows what it means. That won't be true in all cases, and lots of mods like to use acronyms that aren't well-known outside their own specific community.

[Sunbird Alkibijad]

+ rep for the replies, reason in the rep comment.

[Black_ice_Spain]

I wont vote bcs i only play TATW and SS for med2. And thats only 2 choices :/ in addition it would be a fair voting.

I think that voting would be more like 1-3 votes instead of forcing 3 votes (better with a poll but well, polls limit voting too )

Excuse my bad english and good luck with the contest =)

[juvenus]

Yup. Feel free to delete any categories you don't wish to vote in.

All right.

Even though there are some guys who can't spend few minutes of their "so precious" time I'd like to express my full support for the way you organized this voting.
IT'S EASY, DOESN'T TAKE TOO LONG, IT'S ALSO PERFECTLY CLEAR WHAT TO DO.
Now, some members may not be "proficient" enough in english or they simply don't want to read the instructions, but, either way it's their problem.

Cheers

[florin80]

If you can't bring yourself to vote for more than one mod, then these awards probably aren't for you.

So basically you`re telling me that if in a certain category I only consider two entries to have merits and the rest to be either indifferent to me or to find them wanting I`d still be forced to vote something for the third place against my personal preference or else you decide in my place that these awards are not for me? How is that helpful to the honesty of the competition? Who placed this poor excuse in the main FAQ is what I`d like to know. Who exactly is this person that owns the awards and decides who they`re for and who they`re not in such a context? And why exactly is bringing oneself to vote for 3 entries fine and to vote for up to two entries wrong and unworthy of participating in the voting process at all? Imo the only context in which one can decently draw the conclusion that the awards aren`t for someone is if that person can`t bring himself/herself to vote for one mod. If a person votes for someone eligible than those votes should be counted. And I do intend to vote exactly those mods and modders that impressed me, be them 1, 2 or 3 in any category.

[Augustus Lucifer]

So basically you`re telling me that if in a certain category I only consider two entries to have merits and the rest to be either indifferent to me or to find them wanting I`d still be forced to vote something for the third place against my personal preference or else you decide in my place that these awards are not for me? How is that helpful to the honesty of the competition? Who placed this poor excuse in the main FAQ is what I`d like to know. Who exactly is this person that owns the awards and decides who they`re for and who they`re not in such a context? And why exactly is bringing oneself to vote for 3 entries fine and to vote for up to two entries wrong and unworthy of participating in the voting process at all? Imo the only context in which one can decently draw the conclusion that the awards aren`t for someone is if that person can`t bring himself/herself to vote for one mod. If a person votes for someone eligible than those votes should be counted. And I do intend to vote exactly those mods and modders that impressed me, be them 1, 2 or 3 in any category.

The phrase is used figuratively, but since you take exception with it and its interpretation could be viewed as personal it has been removed from the FAQ. On to the actual query.

We will consider votes that don't fill all three categories if the ticket shows effort in that respect, but we don't want to have to do this very much because it could come off as discrimination. If some categories are filled, some aren't, but it looks like thought went into it and either there weren't enough visible candidates or some other concern resulted in the lack of three choices in a particular category, we will consider that. The rule is therefore not without exceptions, but it is used as a standard because it is necessary for the success of the format.

It's not a perfect system, but it will suffice for this year. A couple of words have been changed in the OP to reflect this, since they gave the wrong impression. Notably "will not be counted" has been changed to "may not be counted", which better implies exceptions.

As an aside, if a user wants they are free to leave comments on their ticket in regards to their choices. A couple users have made notes of why they were only able to vote for a couple options in a category -- valid reasons -- and those will be taken into consideration. Leaving notes on your thought process in doing so leaves us less to infer in deciding when to make exceptions. We would much rather you help us understand why you didn't fill 3 slots in a given category due to some valid concern, then have you fill 3 slots with junk options just to say you filled all 3.