Let's try and fix the monthly polls (Please read even if you don't participate) (Patreon)

TL;DR FOR THOSE WHO DONT PARTICIPATE:

Please scroll down to the voting and vote D, for "I don't participate", just so i can get the most accurate numbers, thanks!

Actual post:

I've been hearing from several people that they are unhappy with the way polls have been going, mostly because the "usual winners" keep being, well, winners 99% of the time. And I get that, and I want to fix this so its interesting for everyone.

SO.

I came up with an idea of mine and asked for a few more in my discord server, and i'd like to hear what people think of them. I'm setting this to single vote only so, pick the idea you like the most.

The ideas are:

A. Introduce a 3 month cooldown on winners, but group up every overly popular character as one entity for cooldowns.

Essentially this would be like the old method I had for dealing with this, but with a longer cooldown. And, it would group up every popular character when one of them wins, to reduce the chances of them still taking every win while the others are on cooldown.The popular characters I had in mind for this are:(list might vary depending on changing trends)

Celestia (And daybreaker)

Luna (And nmm)

Cadance

Twilight

Chrysalis

Tempest

My own ocs

So for example, if we were doing this now, next month all of those would be on cooldown for 3 months because luna, celestia and twi are winning this month.

B. Implement the cooldown, but also separate the character and scenario vote.

This would mean that we would run two suggestion posts and two polls per month, first to decide the winning characters, and then to decide what they would be doing. Then everyone can come up with a scenario for those characters. I'd still implement a cooldown on the usual winners though, to avoid them still winning every time.An example of how the schedule on this would run is:

Character suggestions are open for a week

Voting begins, runs for 3-4 days

Scenario suggestions opens the following day

Final Voting begins, runs for 3-4 days

Around one week is left in the month, leaving me time to work on the picture

C. Move everything to Discord, implementing a "curated suggestion" system.

This would mean that you'd need to join discord to participate in these, and it would work like this:

People can constantly make suggestions on a dedicated discord channel

Suggestions that I find doable or interesting are moved to a voting channel where people can react to the ones they like

The most popular suggestion in that channel is made into a pic every month, then deleted

(my personal addition to this idea), any suggestions involving the winning characters are then removed, to make sure others can win aswell

Having it moved totally into discord might be a dealbreaker for some people, but a necessity for this idea since there's no way to do anything similar with patreon's blog-like structure, instead of discord's IM structure.

D. I don't participate.

Vote this if you don't take part in the monthly polls, so I have an accurate metric of every patron.

Please please please vote on this and help me fix this system for everyone, you're also free to leave any thoughts you have below or in discord, i'm always open to hear what people think. I wanna make this community work. 

Love you all, have a great weekend ♥ and thanks for reading/helping me