Jagex is incapable of handling even the amount of bots we have today, how could you possibly imagine them getting the huge influx of bots that would undoubtedly flood the game if free trade were ever to be brought back? If I had kept a list of all the obvious bots that I've ever reported up to now, and if I checked the hiscores I would probably find that a large amount of them are still there, and have probably voted to bring back free trade.
That said, would I have wanted free trade back? Yes, but, and this is important, Jagex can't handle the bots.
This is even before you look at the fact that this voting system is incredibly flawed. They (Jagex) say that there are restrictions in place, however there is no indication of what restrictions those are. Judging by the number of votes already, and how many players are active, it's clear to me that those restrictions are insufficient.
There are a number of concerns that are still unaccounted for:
1. There is no "vote no" button. You can't take silence as "no" as there are people who don't even know about the vote, for instance so they can't give their votes and not only that, but there are people who made the mistake of not reading the page fully before "casting their vote". I'm not one of them, but there are people who were expecting, among other things, that there would be a login prompt and a choice between yes and no. The least they could do is at least put "Vote yes" on the button, instead of "Vote now".
2. No login required. How many people have just gone to a random part of the hiscores and started inputting usernames to artificially increase votes? I hear that a bot has even been created to do this very thing.
3. Apparently you can vote multiple times with the same name according to some people.
Until these issues are resolved and the vote is reset, it is an egregious example of Jagex's poor planning, implementation, and falling back on previous decisions.
Though I hate copypasta, this needs to be seen.
22-Dec-2010 16:41:35
