Ice
Pretty chill guy
People who only give their votes without comments already existed in the old voting system as well, and as far as I can observe, the vote:comment ratio hasn't changed significantly. The actual process of voting (without comments) is a matter of a few seconds in either system, so I don't see how the current system encourages people to "vote-and-run" any more than the old system did. The one exception would be people whose opinions diverge a lot from the overall consensus. In the old voting system, they had to explain themselves lest their votes be ignored in the final tally. Now you can post completely crazy rankings (like putting Eggslimer Battle first or something) without any comments, and nobody would care because even the most divergent votes don't influence the overall score very much (which is why Mystic changed to the new system to begin with). However, highly divergent votes come from one of two groups of people: a) trolls. Nobody wants to hear what a troll has to say, so this is not an issue. b) people whose opinions are sincerely different. And since their opinions are different, they're probably itching to declare their disagreement with the consensus already, so they're likely to post comments anyway.
So really, the only reason to stop posting comments because of the new voting system is if you're secretly a troll who wants to skew the average, which is a pretty futile exercise. No, the real reason that there are fewer comments is that there are fewer votes to begin with, and the ratio has stayed roughly the same. I don't think this has anything to do with the new voting system, it's because of the six-month gap and the fact that activity in this community is declining. You might be fooled by the decent number of entries in this contest, but you have to remember that they were submitted over the course of half a year. I assume that many of the people who used to vote in the OLDC have simply stopped coming here on a regular basis. They either missed the OLDC (which usually doesn't take place in February) or maybe they played the maps and thought "this isn't worth coming back for". This will change when 2.1 comes out, which hopefully won't take that long. I'm fairly confident that we won't miss more than a few OLDCs in the meantime.
Sounds reasonable enough. I dunno, I just feel like numbers would prompt people to explain themselves more thoroughly, while this "ranking" system requires a little less explanation since you're not really applying an independent, objective value to each entry - just a place on a list. But if you say that the ratio hasn't changed at all, then I'll take your word for it.
Maybe I'm just feeling the ol' community-stagnation-depression. :(
Also, I wasn't saying that I didn't like the new voting system, though that's kinda what it sounded like :P
I DO hate the unintuitive way averages tend to weigh scores sometimes. I certainly won't miss that. Though, I do have to say, I'll miss the top-ten leaderboard thing. Will we have one of those? Or do they just not work with this new system?