Adjustment to SOTM

[Sadie 3]

I noticed RuneList offers two monthly events, member and server of the month. Though I believe these are two great ideas to boost the activity, I do have some questions about whether SOTM is efficient or not. 
 

Server of the Month:
As it stands, the server that comes out top #1 on the toplists will be considered the server of the month, receiving awards 

• Unique secondary rank (Eg: SOTM March)
• +25 Positive reputation
• Unique award
• 1 month Toplist/Community Sidebar Advertisement (300x250)

When I saw this, my mind just went wtf? It makes no sense to me as to why one would want to additionally offer free promotions for a server that obviously don't need it, although receiving a unique reward would be cool just to have that flex, I think the general idea of how the winner is determined is in the wrong place. 

My Suggestion:
Personally, I believe Server of the Month should be judged somehow the same way that Member of the Month does. To me, simply rewarding a server for being #1 on the toplist and continously doing this will just end up with the same server receiving the same reward over and over, and eventually SOTM will practically be dead. As an example, where we all probably can agree, DreamScape would smoke every single server if they chose to register onto vote sites. 

In my opinion, Server of the Month should be determined by the servers performance rather than their amount of players. This meaning, instead of simply looking at how many players they have (which is what voting basically is) it'd make a lot more sense in my head to have it based off on their development and management history of the month. Obviously this would be rather hard to moderate, but it don't have to be so super specific. Examples of questions to ask as how to determine a winner:

• Did a certain server release a rather impressive/huge update this month?
• Did a certain server make a comeback and have risen from the dead this month?
• Did a certain server introduce something that's unique or never seen before this month?

By judging it this way, you also give opportunity for new servers, not so popular servers and even big servers to have a FAIR comparisation to one another as to which server ACTUALLY deserves to be placed as "Server of the Month". As again, I personally don't believe more players = a good server, DreamScape being a perfect example. This in my opinion would also keep the fun little competition that this is as well as the awards itself actual value when it's not simply given based on one criteria (being votes). 

That's my opinion, I really do believe this would be much better in the long-term, how does everyone else feel about this? 

[SilverNova 18]

Hasn't really crossed my mind now that you mention it. The only problem is that such decisions could easily be biased. Just having a friend or two on a server can swing it in favour of becoming SOTM. If there was a good method to decide on a SOTM through data rather than opinions, it would be a much better approach. However, we will speak about this in the team. Good call!

[Nes 64]

Makes sense tbh.

[SilverNova 18]

Locked as it was implemented after a community poll on Discord.