Since my biggest worry about the featured-variants program is diversity, I will refrain from seconding any "Chess with Alternative Armies" variants until we have featured a fair amount of variants from other categories. No matter how much I like Metamachy, which I think would indeed be the most deserving of the CwAA category. Sorry about that, Jean-Louis.
It is disappointing (and indeed childish) that inventors abuse the programs that are intended for guiding novices in the field of chess variants merely to promote their own inventions. The 'favorites' mechanism is corrupted in the same way. There is something to be said for allowing inventors to favorite some of their own games, to indicate what they consider their best inventions. But with a crowd as childish as what we are dealing with, it only seems to lead to most inventors shamelessly favoriting all of their inventions, just to get them higher on the list of favorites. This is no doubt fuelled by the thought "his invention passed mine because of a self vote, so I must retaliate by self-voting too". So in practice allowing to favorite your own games does more harm than good.
Another flaw in the favorites system is that some people have a much lower threshold for favoriting something than others. Being favorited by someone that has hundreds of favorites doesn't mean all that much, and definitely a lot less than being favorited by someone with only 10 favorites. And since most of the votes are of course from people that vote most, this makes the favorites score pretty insignificant, dominated by votes from people that don't really care. To cure these flaws the system should impose a maximum on the number of variants you can favorite, and in addition a maximum on the number of your own inventions you can favorite. Even making the latter a percentage, to not disadvantaging prolific inventors too much, could be dangerous. Because I foresee the situation where childish inventors would create a massive number of garbage variants just to create voting power to use for promoting their serious inventions. After all, "it only takes 10 sec to invent a new chess variant"...
To preclude that the number of your own games that you can favorite could be made a percentage of the number of inventions you have that are favorited by others.
That being said, I second the nomination of Shatranj of Troy.
Since my biggest worry about the featured-variants program is diversity, I will refrain from seconding any "Chess with Alternative Armies" variants until we have featured a fair amount of variants from other categories. No matter how much I like Metamachy, which I think would indeed be the most deserving of the CwAA category. Sorry about that, Jean-Louis.
It is disappointing (and indeed childish) that inventors abuse the programs that are intended for guiding novices in the field of chess variants merely to promote their own inventions. The 'favorites' mechanism is corrupted in the same way. There is something to be said for allowing inventors to favorite some of their own games, to indicate what they consider their best inventions. But with a crowd as childish as what we are dealing with, it only seems to lead to most inventors shamelessly favoriting all of their inventions, just to get them higher on the list of favorites. This is no doubt fuelled by the thought "his invention passed mine because of a self vote, so I must retaliate by self-voting too". So in practice allowing to favorite your own games does more harm than good.
Another flaw in the favorites system is that some people have a much lower threshold for favoriting something than others. Being favorited by someone that has hundreds of favorites doesn't mean all that much, and definitely a lot less than being favorited by someone with only 10 favorites. And since most of the votes are of course from people that vote most, this makes the favorites score pretty insignificant, dominated by votes from people that don't really care. To cure these flaws the system should impose a maximum on the number of variants you can favorite, and in addition a maximum on the number of your own inventions you can favorite. Even making the latter a percentage, to not disadvantaging prolific inventors too much, could be dangerous. Because I foresee the situation where childish inventors would create a massive number of garbage variants just to create voting power to use for promoting their serious inventions. After all, "it only takes 10 sec to invent a new chess variant"...
To preclude that the number of your own games that you can favorite could be made a percentage of the number of inventions you have that are favorited by others.
That being said, I second the nomination of Shatranj of Troy.