Poll supports update (Patreon)

Hi all,

New post to announce a small change that will be applied to supports starting this month (TL;DR at the bottom of the post).

If you don't remember what supports are, they are these percentages between square brackets that appear in polls:

They increase the amount of votes a suggestion get from the poll, 10% bonus votes per support. They're separate from flat bonus votes that are carried from poll to poll and usually appear between square brackets with a '+'. Supports are given when a Super Size Tier patron choose to support a suggestion made by another patron instead of making one themselves.

I've crunched some numbers, and here are the results: there's been 39 supports made over the last five months. Over the same period, 184 suggestions have been made. A supported suggestion receives on average 200 votes (without bonus votes of any kind). The average bonus brought by a support is +19 votes (highest: +45 votes, lowest: +6 votes), the median bonus is +16 votes.

Overall, I'm satisfied with how supports work on popular suggestions, because they amplify what the majority of voters is going for. Supports to these popular suggestions are very effective, and maybe even a little too much (45 bonus votes is huge!). However, conversely, supports to less popular suggestions aren't very effective. Which can make it seem like supporting such suggestions isn't worth it. I want to change this!

The change will be the following: starting this month, the [10%] bonus will be replaced by a [5%][+10] bonus. 5% bonus votes + 10 flat bonus votes per support. This will have two consequences: make supports more effective on less popular suggestions, and a tad less effective on already popular suggestions. I've used the previous number of 200 poll votes as the baseline to balance the new bonuses. If a suggestion support receives 200 poll votes, it will receive as many bonus votes from the new support bonuses than it did from the old support bonus. Above 200 votes it receives less bonus votes. Under 200 votes it receives more bonus votes.

Here's a small table to compare old numbers vs new numbers:

TL;DR: supports weren't effective on less popular suggestions, there's now a bottom line for them to ensure they're effective in all cases, and they're now a tad less overpowered on popular suggestions.

And that's all for today!