How to Suggest a Poll That Gets Picked on versus4.fun

Nothing on versus4.fun goes live on its own. A person reads every suggestion, merges duplicates, and publishes the questions with the most backing first. That makes the suggest page a small skill: a suggestion that is clear, neutral and about the game is published quickly, and one that is vague or aimed at someone is not. This post is about writing the first kind.

Say which game, and be specific

Pick the game from the list. Then name the thing the argument is about in the words the community uses: the character, the weapon, the map, the mechanic, the patch. “The new sniper” is clear to that game’s players; “the thing they added” is not. The person reading the queue plays games too, but the suggestion should not make them guess.

Make the shape obvious

versus4.fun has four formats, and a suggestion that reads like one of them is easy to place:

• Two things against each other: “A or B, which wins right now” is a VS
• A wish about one thing: “should X be nerfed” is a Nerf / Keep / Buff
• An assessment of one thing: “is X too strong on this patch” is a Power check
• A judgement on an update: “did the latest patch help” is a Patch verdict

You do not choose the format yourself; the person publishing does. But a suggestion in one of these shapes skips the question of what you meant. The formats are explained in the four poll formats.

Keep the question neutral

A poll works when both sides of the argument can tap their answer without feeling the question was rigged. “Is X finally getting the nerf it deserves” is an opinion with a question mark; “should X be nerfed” is a question. Neutral phrasing also gets more votes, because people on the other side of the argument answer it instead of ignoring it.

Ask about the game, not a person

The only rule on the suggest page is this one. Polls are about the game. Anything aimed at a named individual, a streamer, a pro, a developer, a fellow player, is not published, and neither are slurs, doxxing, cheats or piracy. A suggestion that mentions a person is simply dropped, so keep the subject on the thing in the game.

Duplicates are support, not competition

If someone already suggested your question, your send is merged with theirs and counted as backing. The queue is ordered by backing, so the question many people are asking rises on its own. There is no advantage in rewording a question to make it look new; the merged version with all its support gets published sooner than two half-backed variants.

Practically, this means the best thing you can do for an argument your group is having is to have several of you suggest it in roughly the same words.

What happens after you send

The bot check runs, the suggestion joins the queue, a person reads it. If it is clear, neutral and about the game, it is placed into a format and published; if it duplicates something already there, it adds to that one’s backing. There is no notification, and no account to check back from. The poll appears on the game’s page when it goes live, and the home page shows new and active polls across games.

Suggestions that are hard to publish

Some suggestions sit in the queue because they cannot be placed, not because they are bad:

• A question with no game named, or a game the site does not cover yet
• A question that spans two games, which no format can hold
• A question with four or more options, which does not fit the fixed answer sets
• A question that is really two questions, such as “is X OP and should Y be buffed”
• A question that only makes sense to people who were in one particular match

Each of these is fixable by the person suggesting it: name the game, keep to one game, pick one thing, split the double question in two. A suggestion that arrives in a placeable shape is published; one that needs guessing waits.

Why a person reads the queue

It would be faster to publish everything automatically, and the site does not, for two reasons. The first is the only rule: polls are about the game, not about a person, and a person is better at spotting a question aimed at someone than any filter. The second is placement: putting a suggestion into the right format with the subject named correctly is a judgement, and a wrongly placed poll produces a count that means nothing.

The reading takes time, which is why the queue is ordered by support. A question that many people have sent is the one worth reading first, and merging duplicates is how the queue knows which that is.

After it goes live

Once a suggestion is published it is an ordinary poll, with its own count on the current patch, and the people who suggested it have no special standing over it. The best thing to do with a poll you suggested is to vote on it honestly and to let the people you were arguing with know it exists, so the count fills with the people who actually hold the argument.

A suggestion checklist

1. The right game selected
2. The subject named the way players name it
3. A question in one of the four shapes
4. Neutral wording both sides would answer
5. About the game, not a person

That is all the queue needs. For what happens to the result once people vote, see how to read a verdict.