The one-man-one-vote system is not so very different from the 1/sqrt(N) weighting. People that have casted 43 votes (close to the maximum of 50 that you propose) already get weight 3. So a weight of 19 does not advantage you as much as it sounds (but still a factor 6). It is mainly those that have casted more than 50 votes, which you don't want to allow at all, that get heavily discounted. With a more typical 10 votes the weight is still only 6.
With a cube root someone casting 48 votes would get weight 2, and those with more would be 50% discarded rather than being forbidden / ignored. While casting a single vote would give a weight of 7, only 3.5 times larger. With 10 votes the weight would be 3, only 50% more than with 48 votes.
The problem is that people giving 270 and 389 votes are already in the database, so what should we do with them? Completely ignoring all their votes seems a bit harsh, requiring them to 'unfavorite' several hundreds of variants a bit inhumane. It is like you say: if someone favorites tons of variants, it doesn't mean much. So it seems reasonable to reduce the weight of those votes, but a bit inflexible to reduce it by 100% always.
Perhaps the weight should be made to saturate at twice what you get for ~50 votes. Or even decrease if you favorite too few variants. That would thwart attempts to 'pump up' a single variant as a favor to a friend by people who otherwise do not care.
A special symbol could be added for variants preferred by its inventor. Like an asterisk behind the number of people that voted for it. This raises the question of how to put bounds on that, preventing inventors to automatically favor all their variants. Writing such a symbol is an all-or-nothing action, so you could do little else than omitting the symbol on all variants for an author who favorited, say, more than 25% of his submissions. This would then raise the technical problem that you would have to figure out how many games each author submitted, as he could have games that no one favorited. So going through the favorites list would not be enough, you would have to go through the entire database.
An alternative would be to allow one plus the number of his favorited variants divided by 3 (rounded down). Then inventors that never got any votes from others can only vote for one of their games (to vote for two you would need three favorited games). With 10 games favorited by others you could either vote for 4 of those, or 6 different ones.
I am not convinced by the fairness of one-man-one-vote. A variant that gets a vote from someone that voted 50 times can very well, even in the eyes of that person, rank below 49 other variants. While getting the vote from a person that only casted 10 votes means he thinks it belongs to the 10 best. So why should they get equal reward?
The one-man-one-vote system is not so very different from the 1/sqrt(N) weighting. People that have casted 43 votes (close to the maximum of 50 that you propose) already get weight 3. So a weight of 19 does not advantage you as much as it sounds (but still a factor 6). It is mainly those that have casted more than 50 votes, which you don't want to allow at all, that get heavily discounted. With a more typical 10 votes the weight is still only 6.
With a cube root someone casting 48 votes would get weight 2, and those with more would be 50% discarded rather than being forbidden / ignored. While casting a single vote would give a weight of 7, only 3.5 times larger. With 10 votes the weight would be 3, only 50% more than with 48 votes.
The problem is that people giving 270 and 389 votes are already in the database, so what should we do with them? Completely ignoring all their votes seems a bit harsh, requiring them to 'unfavorite' several hundreds of variants a bit inhumane. It is like you say: if someone favorites tons of variants, it doesn't mean much. So it seems reasonable to reduce the weight of those votes, but a bit inflexible to reduce it by 100% always.
Perhaps the weight should be made to saturate at twice what you get for ~50 votes. Or even decrease if you favorite too few variants. That would thwart attempts to 'pump up' a single variant as a favor to a friend by people who otherwise do not care.
A special symbol could be added for variants preferred by its inventor. Like an asterisk behind the number of people that voted for it. This raises the question of how to put bounds on that, preventing inventors to automatically favor all their variants. Writing such a symbol is an all-or-nothing action, so you could do little else than omitting the symbol on all variants for an author who favorited, say, more than 25% of his submissions. This would then raise the technical problem that you would have to figure out how many games each author submitted, as he could have games that no one favorited. So going through the favorites list would not be enough, you would have to go through the entire database.
An alternative would be to allow one plus the number of his favorited variants divided by 3 (rounded down). Then inventors that never got any votes from others can only vote for one of their games (to vote for two you would need three favorited games). With 10 games favorited by others you could either vote for 4 of those, or 6 different ones.
I am not convinced by the fairness of one-man-one-vote. A variant that gets a vote from someone that voted 50 times can very well, even in the eyes of that person, rank below 49 other variants. While getting the vote from a person that only casted 10 votes means he thinks it belongs to the 10 best. So why should they get equal reward?