I wonder if players will realize that it will be in the best interest of their group to up vote their friends stats.

Or that it will also be safer to give themselves a "4/4" and get voted down to a 3/4. This is assuming that most groups don't just call BS on a 5/5.

It's not a hard game to take advantage of, mechanically. If you're trying to powergame in EotW, more so than with any other game I've ever played, you've missed the point.

Or play with a bunch of total munchkins and give each other 6/5 with "positive emtoional encouragment" as an excuse.

It's not a hard game to take advantage of, mechanically.

Truer words have never been spoken. Game systems like EotW eschew complicated mechanics in favour of providing a story-heavy experience that moves quickly from scene to scene. The balance sort of relies on a gentleman's agreement of sorts, that the focus will be put on role-playing over roll playing.

If everyone in your group WANTS to play a game where they have idealized stats and pummel all challenges easily, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. It's about the kind of story YOU want to tell, and High-Action Physics-Be-Damned apocalypse is a perfectly valid type of story. Of course it won't be scary in the least. It won't be emotional or tense. But there's nothing that says you HAVE to play a tense, scary horror movie of a game just because it's billed that way on the back cover.