Like I said, those paid votes scared away a lot of consumers. Nothing made sense. Crap earning top dollar (most of that money was actually going to a handful of vote sellers but nobody knew that). Quality creators left out of frustration. In one of my first posts pointing out those issues I suggested the posts with paid votes be marked as 'paid programming' or 'advertisments' since that what they were, but I was ignored, things got worse. They almost destroyed the entire content creation element of this blockchain, for nothing.
Things are better but you're right about gaming and I pointed out how it didn't take me long to find an example of it. That name I mentioned was spamming garbage, and I'm sure the voters are also voting for many other garbage posts created in the same fashion. All this spam for a few quarters a day clogs the arteries here and we can't find the good stuff. Scroll and scroll. Click, realize it's just a shit post, exit, scroll, scroll, click, another shit post. Where are the people?!? They're around, just hard to find on the feed.
And of course limiting 'success' is a terrible idea. No need to pick on the actual content creators for doing well.