Excelsior

Here are a few tricks on how to get the most out of voting.

First it's good to know how frequently you can vote on each site. You can usually vote once per a reset. Once the toplists reset, your vote counts again. Here's reset times of the toplists we're listed:

ConnectUO - every monday morning (exact time is listed on their website)
Top200 - every day, resets every month.
Top100 - vote every 12 hours, reset every 30 days.
TopShards - every 14 days.

Which means that if you vote on Top200 on monday, and again on tuesday, your vote on tuesday won't count. Therefor it doesn't make sense to vote every day on Top200.

But there's another trick. The votes are recorded per IP. Some have a static IP, and some have dynamic. Those with static really can vote every x days/hours, but if you have a dynamic IP, all you need to do is wait for it to change, and you can vote again.

If you don't know if you have static or dynamic IP, here's how you can find out. Go to http://whatismyip.com/, and write down the IP number it shows you. If you have a dynamic IP, your ISP will give you a new IP the next time you connect, or automatically every 12/24/48 hours. So just re-check after you reconnect or the next day, and if the number is different, that means you have a dynamic IP address.

It also works if you have access to multiple IP addresses - for example if you can check internet from work/school, or if you go to a cybercafe, you can vote from there.

But anyway, there might certain conditions for voting we don't know, they might change, that's why the best way of getting votes up is just by voting as frequently as possible.

How about using proxy servers to make it look like you are voting from a lot of places?

I think that would be considered cheating, although in the post above I wrote that you can use other computers to vote... Hmm... Well in the event that someone would vote through a proxy I wouldn't be able to know or do anything about it, but I advise against it.

I'm not sure if they have any rules for or against that (can't find any TOS on their website), but my logic tells me that's cheating.

I'm sorry to say this, and sorrier still if it makes anybody angry, but usually, the reason that reason that you can vote once per reset is that a fair vote is one per person. To say that we can bypass this rule by voting from every computer we deal with during the day, well, that's just disappointing. You haven't even tried any justifications such as that the reset thing is a formality or whatever. I don't really see the difference with a proxy except that you're moving around less.

You should know, better than anyone else, that this is an amazing shard with wonderful players and staff. Shouldn't reminders to vote be enough?

Yes, that should be enough. I meant for example, if you have a computer at work, you can vote from there too. But not if you have an option of changing your IP every 10 minutes to vote 20 times a day, that would be a bad thing.

I know of other servers that have voting stones in game and give rewards for using them. They can't verify that you actually vote but they make the browser to the voting sites pop up.

Toots wrote:I know of other servers that have voting stones in game and give rewards for using them. They can't verify that you actually vote but they make the browser to the voting sites pop up.

And I think you hit the nail on the head when you said, "They can't verify that you actually vote..." I would assume that's why there's not specific voting prizes in that way. Reason enough to vote should be a higher player base and continued growth.