There is no reason to complain when there is nothing you want to change. The people with an issue will always be the more vocal. Hate and disagreement are louder. The people voting no in this poll have no reason to try and convince others of their belief because their belief is clearly the more popular one. Regardless even counting the number of users in this thread that want them removed or not the amount is pretty 50/50 and not "Everyone wants them to be removed". Though the number of posts and the lengths people will go to say "yes" is more than the people that say no.

Now saying that everyone except one user that has posted an answer other than you want to here is making "childish comments and crying" is ridiculous. This post claiming exploitation, clone accounts and other people are crying has made you lose all credibility in this discussion. Clearly you are the one making childish comments because the poll hasn't turned out the way you wanted.

One of my most down-voted posts was in an Activision Blizzard article where I said I was going to take advantage of the company's most recent stupid decisions and buy some of their stock as it plummeted. I thought it would be a good thought to get out there for people to maybe take a chance and make a little easy money.

Well I for one put my money where my mouth was and bought 80 shares at 59.38 dollars each. It did dip down lower to a low 57 dollars, but I had no idea where the bottom would be. It's now over 67 dollars and I'm up over 600 dollars, all less than 6 weeks time. Now I just have to figure out when to dump it.

None of this means I support Activision's past actions, it just means I saw an opportunity to turn a negative into a positive.

I'm curious to know if anyone else took advantage of the Blizzard situation?

I didn't look through every post on this thread, but who is threatening to drop their "supporter status" if downvotes get removed?

Also it's pretty clear that your comments on the Uncharted movie article had some connection with putting this on the forum. You're also claiming that everyone wants the system gone, when clearly that's not the case. I like the system because it filters out the childish/trolling comments from the ones where people are actually interested in a discussion.

I am probably one of the people here who has gaming opinions that are fairly out of sync with the general population and so I thought that I would share my thoughts on this. If this were a question of whether or not to introduce article down-voting that wasn't previously present, I would say no. Up+down-voting makes sense in political discourse but if it's just a person's opinion on something like gaming, up-voting only like what we have on the main forum is more than enough. A person's tastes in gaming are often a lot more personal than something like a political opinion where you are generally on one side of the aisle or the other and the down-voting feature kind of discourages complete honesty in favor of saying something that is popular with the crowd (unless you have really thick skin, which I do not).

That said, the up-voting and down-voting has been a feature in the articles ever since I first started frequenting this message board in 2014 and this community has kind of evolved around it. You kind of expect that your opinions are going to be heavily scrutinized if you post in that part of the message board and there are plenty of other places you can post your opinions if you want to have a bit less judgment. As a result, I would probably lean in favor of just leaving it as it is currently. No need to change something that isn't broken in my view.

That said, a change that I would recommend considering is having a person's posts in the articles count towards their total post count.  I think that members should get the same reward for posting there as in the main message board.

One idea that comes to mind is keeping the downvote system (with or without the supporter perk) but hiding the exact downvote count. Instead, simply display the upvote count, and if there are 'enough' downvotes compared to upvotes, display a 'this comment is controversial' symbol near the upvote count. What the symbol might look like and what's 'enough' are up for debate and deeper specificiation, but it could certainly be made to work if this kind of a system was desired.

Pros:

• Allows upvotes to somewhat dictate the order the comments are shown in.
• Allows controversial comments to be recognized.

Cons:

• Potentially gives unwarranted visibility to bad comments.
• If only one 'controversial symbol' is used, different 'grades' of controversialness cannot be distinguished.

Replace the increased voting perk with something else. It's not that important of a perk anyway, the perk I like the most is the removal of ads. Without it the site is very unusable.

Keep down votes, remove the extra power to it. Just replace it with something else. Maybe a Supporter only section of the forum? I don't know,

I think a supporter-only area would just be dead.  So, while a fine idea in theory, I don't support that in practice.  

As far as voting "power", I think if you take the downvote multiplier away from supporters, you should take the upvote multiplier away too.  It doesn't make sense any other way.  Either supporters get extra votes or they don't.  Otherwise, you're saying that supporters get extra voting power only if they vote the way you (we) want them to.  That eliminates the validity of the upvote/downvote system completely.  

To be clear, I still support no changes at all at this time.  But, if the admins decide to kill the multiplier, it needs to be eliminated both ways. 

Also, as a supporter for a few years now, here are the three "perks" that I make use of:

- No ads
- Vote multiplier
- Support staff income

Of those three, the vote multiplier is least important to me, by a wide margin. But, it does eliminate one of the only three perks that mean anything to me. I can get around the ads with an ad blocker. So, that would leave support for staff as the only reason for someone in my position to be a supporter. The other perks are of zero interest to me. I don't even remember what they are, because I simply don't care about them. I think it is reasonable to assume that some other supporters might feel similarly.

To be clear, I am not threatening to drop supporter status based on decisions made about the voting system. I am simply saying that this discussion does impact something that holds value to supporters. If there are people subbing on alt accounts just for the purpose of vote multiplying, that tells us for sure that the perk is very valuable to some people.

Also, to reiterate what I mentioned above, eliminating only the down vote multiplier is bad for everyone on the site, supporters included.  That significantly skews the voting "results". So, leaving half of the vote multiplier in place is worse than eliminating it completely, from my perspective. 

I would say the three things I use it for are:

No ads

Supporting the staff

The blue theme

I forgot about the blue theme.  I use it as well.