alt Hacker NewsYeah, I think those games have more potential than most people think. I love voting mechanics (spent a lot of time on ranking systems) and some have good stories ranging from "the heartwarming story of Nikki exploring a continent, making friends and proving her mad skills" to "a vicious fight for survival in an ancient court"
What's a good voting system? I remember checking out Dress to Impress (not a mobile but an incredibly popular Roblox game), and it had a somewhat unpleasant, imo, voting system -- players vote for each other's outfits and the score is a sum of the scores your co-players' gave you which incentivizies players to give everyone the lowest score. The game tries to "punish" this behavior by detecting "unfair" voters and lowering the weight of their votes, but I feel like you could tweak the original incentives instead by changing the mechanic. Having to rank outfits instead of giving each outfit a score could work I think? But there are probably other problems I'm missing. I dnn't play too many mutliplayer games.
(On the other hand, while I believe thinking about "gaming" the ranking takes away from the fun of the game, Dress to Impress is massively popular, so maybe this frustration is what makes it popular. IDK if kids play it because there are no competitors in the genre or because some competitive toxicity is addictive.)