Judgement_Dave

[ QUOTE ]
What I did find annoying was that lack of feedback. How am I supposed to make stuff better without feedback?!

[/ QUOTE ]
Though the feedback system may be buggy at this moment - which could explain a lack of feedback received.

Of course the annoying thing is if it is broken (even with sporadic or intermittant feedback) but people don't realise then many may just stop giving feedback as:
* feedback that they have given has never been acted upon (due to never being delivered, but they don't know that)
* they haven't received feedback in loads of ratings, and they've reached the point of 'if no-one else seems to be bothering then why the heck should I?'

[ QUOTE ]
they overrate thier own creative ablity
...
I was given a 3 for one of my arcs, which I'm happy with, considering I don't think of myself as any kind of creative genius, and I have problems with literacy.


[/ QUOTE ]
I found a 3 rating after 100+ votes on Handyman slightly dismaying given that I know to achieve this it must have had several 1s or 2s. That's not so much what I found dismaying in itself, but to be getting that whilst seeing zero-effort, 20-glowies missions hitting 4 or 5 rating after 20 ratings...

I've never considered that my published efforts would be works of genius or universally acclaimed, but I only publish once I believe I should be hitting better than 1 or 2...


Admittedly Handyman was thrown together pretty quickly (c.2hrs iirc) due to it originally being a closed beta mission for testing petitioning and I used the opportunity to test some custom mob design issues. I only provided a bit of innuendo and poor humour to add a bit of 'colour' rather than just having a dry 'petition me' arc.

Having said that... I'm still fairly convinced that it ought to manage better than 2. Especially as 1 is the lowest possible rating and so is basically a vote for 'avoid this arc like the plague'.

[ QUOTE ]
Afaik you cannot trigger glowies to activate on events


I used a destrucatble object as a sort of work round. It's not 100% satifactory though.

[/ QUOTE ]
This.

Although I'd lose the AFAIK - it's a straight 'You cannnot trigger glowies to spawn as a result of another trigger'.

It happened yet again (though was fine when the servers came back up).

If you want to play this but cannot find it, please check back occasionally, as I'm not removing the darn thing - it's the server playing silly beggers. Though when it pops back up depends on when I spot it's down and I don't actually spend 24/7 ingame...

[ QUOTE ]
who are you or me or anyone to decide what a [censored] arc is and think it's better to have them removed.

[/ QUOTE ]
We all are able to decide and should be able to decide and discuss in public as long we remain civil. What we aren't able to do, and maybe shouldn't be able to do, is impose our limits upon others.

However I feel it's worth pointing out (even in my verbose way) that it is possible to do better than just add an objective to a destroyed atlas map full of a custom mob and hit publish, leaving most other fields as defaults/empty... Or to do tho old 'play me - quick badges' mission of 20 clickies just like the other 200 similar missions already published... Or the 'JD is godlike' 1-mission arc where my character is an extreme AV just coz I'm so uber...

Hell - if a single person reads the OP and decides to actually hold off til they add even a minutesworth of thought then maybe, just maybe, that's a little better quality for everyone to enjoy.

My views are subjective but it's much like people's tastes in food: I like hot food, others like french or italian or whatever. But if the chef is using manure as the main ingrediant the meal will taste like <expletive deleted> for all...


[ QUOTE ]
And two, is did you really believe this was going to end any other way?

[/ QUOTE ]
The optimistic part of me hoped so.

I was extremely nervous about publishing my first mission as it may just be ingame but you are publishing to the masses. It's easy to look a complete idiot if you stand up in public on a whim and start spouting any ill-thought out trash... Publishing in MA isn't that much different. It's still communicating with the public.

And I actually thought that most people would prefer to avoid being perceived as idiots and so would put at least a little thought into what they published.

It appears that I was wrong and stupidly over-optimistic.


BTW - I already appreciate the irony that anyone who perceives me as an idiot may have enjoyed from the above. So - no need to reply pointing it out.

[ QUOTE ]
The problem is (if you pardon the analogy) One man's "Juggs Weekly" is another Man's "War and Peace".

[/ QUOTE ]
I take the analogy to be correct, but possibly not how you mean.

It's like farms vs skill tests vs story/RP arcs. Each appeals to different audiences (hence the need for categorisation in search) but each should try to have some merit rather than be the cheapest, easiest, thrown-together-in-1-minute kind of affair that dominates the MA repository at the moment.

I bet that even "Juggs Weekly" have some standards of quality that they try to attain.. although they are obviously different to those sought by Tolstoy as the target audience is (presumably) different.

[ QUOTE ]
What can I say, the cream will naturally raise to the top and the rating system is your friend re: searching for new content.

[/ QUOTE ]
What can I say - optimistic faith in the ratings system as it stands.

[ QUOTE ]
Its very possible the MA authors you despise have tried their best bless em, they could be 9 years old for all you know.

[/ QUOTE ]
If these arcs display the level of imagination that children have then the parents ought to be ashamed. Time was that children showed (and were encouraged to use) imagination.

[ QUOTE ]
Removed an exploit.

The Vampyr spawn chambers.

I dunno if the got the Vazilok Toxic drums an the WOTE christals though.

[/ QUOTE ]
An emergency maintenance to remove something that was reported well before it went live?

But no news on the problems such as vanishing mobs, arcs marking themselves as invalid, co-op teams getting sent to different instances on same MA mission or some funky crashes (lost a full co-op team as we had 5min+ loading screen and frezes/crashes)...

I wish you were jesting, but I know that you won't be.

I've not noticed any - but there was a tiny client patch.

Given that there are several bugs in I14 apparent to several/many of us it'd be good if we had some idea of what the devs believe they've fixed...

[ QUOTE ]
But we can work to improve this state of affairs by reviewing and rating.

[/ QUOTE ]
Can we really do it by rating?

The number at the side of the rating stars is the number of ratings, not the number of times played, or the number of players who played it.

So the worst we can do to excrement is to give it just 1 star. Unless it is petitionable, which is a different matter.

Now if I see an arc with a single rating of 1 star should I avoid it if I'm being fair to the author and myself? Not really, IMO

You cannot please everyone all the time and so a single one star could be the one person in a 100 who hates an otherwise univerally adored arc...

So how many people do need to rate and 1 star the pap? And given how much there appears to be, how long will that take?

Maybe we look the other way - at 5 starring really good arcs... we still need to wade through the mire to find them. If we go off a few limited suggestions (review threads etc) then only a few arcs will get found and reviewed and popularised. The other good arcs will still be left amongst the silage.

And how do we use ratings to find the arcs with general appeal amongst the arcs that got 7 5 star ratings just because a full team of 8 all played each others arcs and rated them 5 stars??


The best way is really to try and stop drivel being published in the first place...

I'd almost be up for a minor fee to allow publishing an arc just to act as a barrier to entry to dissuade people from publishing without forethought... but that would be very wrong and would also dissuade the creators who (whether I 'like' their works or not) do actually try to put some thought into their creations.

[ QUOTE ]
I'd like it broken down further (this is actually different from your suggestion, but heck, bandwagon!) -

As in ratings for plot, characters, interactions, that kind of thing.

Because whilst I've enjoyed a few of the arcs I've played, I've had to rate them down because of spelling mistakes, info that contradicts other info (as in the character name was one thing, the info called them another), 4th wall breaking stuff too (not Judgement Dave's arc, I'd like to add, I liked that 4th wall breaking) - like the clue being provided by a speech from a bodybag! That kind of thing.

[/ QUOTE ]
Oh I've had many thoughts re: ratings/categorisation.

TBH I see the categorisation as more important. With only a single rating if a story is categorised as RP/story driven then a rating may be assumed to relate to how well it matches that categorisation. Whereas a story marked as a skill test would be rated as a skill test.

But that is a different matter entirely, and many, but not all of my notes/musings have been passed on to a 3rd party site... so hopefully some may be useful to them. If not then when I have chance I'll be working on a site myself...

[ QUOTE ]
Don't think he got any... I'm beginning to think you only get feedback tells if you are online.

[/ QUOTE ]
I've certainly had a few (before the maintenance) waiting for me when I log in. They were all from EU players - though that may be coincidental given that I'm on the EU boards and that may be how the found the arcs.

So for ages I was getting quietly optimistic about MA.

Even done halfwell there would be a great source for:
* the imaginative people to be creative and tell new and interesting stories
* xp/INF farmers to create there own farms
* people who just want to play but know the dev-arcs off by heart to get some new stories and encounters, and even new custom mobs
* skill tests and challenges for the people who consider CoX to be too easy (whether in general or for specific characters)

Heck - you pays your money you play your way. MA could deliver something for a lot of different playstyles.

There are bugs, but every large program change is bound to have bugs. If you don't think that's acceptable then please accept my application to your game when it's available.

OK - if I'm honest IMO it needed to wait til after Easter, but that's not the the thing that's got me a little riled...

I think that the devs have pretty much delivered a decent v1 MA editor (heck - if you knew me you'd know that this is actually high praise).

But...

...then I look at the abhorent arc browser, the poor feedback mechanism and worst of all I looked at the mass of arcs that were appearing.

In under 24 hrs I think there had been 12000+ missions published (although many were later unpublished or dropped off the browser). IIRC There were 6000+ published arcs appearing in the browse results at c.20:00 last night...

Many of these arcs are utter dirge that seem to have been thrown together ASAP just to get whatever badges might be going. They are the type of thing that would be more than acceptable during beta on test, when trying to test the system and find bugs, but on live?!?!?!

If we remove every 'play me for easy badges' we'd get rid of a good percentage of the published arcs... we'd maybe lose 10%.

If we then remove every duplicated farm (heck I don't mind people having farms.. but do we need so many?) and every duplicate mission (that was published twice from over eager button-clicking) we'd lose a further 20%.

Strip out the blatant IP infringing ones, the defamatory ones about famous RL people and the bigotted ones (if the mission info was correct I really can't understand people who use a tool like MA to create the homophobic rubbish that one arc seemed to be) and I think we're down to about 60% left.

Get rid of the ones with absolute minimal imagination/effort that are just done to be ill-considered ego-boosting 'this is the origin of me aren't I uber' arcs (but we can leave the well written entertaining ones) and we have about 40% left.

Now remove all the ones where the publisher* shows a complete lack of imagination and can't even be bothered to make it look like they care and I guess we'd be down to about 10% left.


If we removed all the above from infecting the public MA reopository then we could probably just about manage with the inadequate search functionality that exists, as most arcs would at least stand a chance of having general appeal and the author spent more than 5 minutes thinking about them.


I know that my tastes won't be everyones - but I'm not asking that every arc is good in my (subjective) opinion. But it would be good if at least most arcs tried to have some appeal...

I don't mind farmers having farms. I don't mind the odd 'play this for x easy badges' arc. But I just think that anything of any real quality or value is going to be lost in the sheer size of the landslide of excrement.

It's a little like how when the computer finally started reaching homes virtually every shop selling them had at least one computer where some idiot had started 10 PRINT "KEVIN IS GREAT! ": GOTO 10...

Such a waste of a tool with such potential committed by tools with such little potential.



* note: not 'author' or 'creator' as both these terms carry implied creativity when referring to 'stories'.

Make the MA ratings distribution available - at least to the author.

There is a world of difference between having a rating of '3' because:
- Everybody without exception voted '3' (so no-one really likes or dislikes the arc...)
- The player base was split equally between rating 1 and rating 5 (a marmite arc)
- It's actually been getting all 2s except for a single 3 (which makes it a 3 in the browser if earlier comments about rounding up the average still stand)

So show (at least to the author) exactly how many of each star rating have been awarded.

[ QUOTE ]
Why ae the villain maps and hero maps seperated anyway!? It makes no sence at all.. I need a Circle of thorns map... I need it to be random... and I need it large. Pick from all maps available.

Seperating by origin rather then the faction part they where originally made for makes a lot more sense. This is one game now.

[/ QUOTE ]
It will make sense - just not sense from how you (and other mission authors) want to use the maps.

My guess is that it's another throwback to the game pigg files apparently storing game resources in a virtual directory structure. The CoH maps and CoV maps are probably in very different places within that virtual directory structure.

If it was already considered, merging them into mob-related/style-related groupings regardless of CoH/CoV origin was probably a fair bit of work for very little gain. But we know that there's a big document of ideas for v2 if v1 goes down well...

[ QUOTE ]
and how Dev Choice arcs seem to be only 5 stars, meaning badge hunters are pretty hampered at trying for it, not only by their own community, the players, but also the UI itself...

[/ QUOTE ]
Theoretically: Devs Choice has nothing to do with stars at all. It awarded when a dev likes an arc.

Practically: Time being a constraint, the devs might use star ratings to help decide which arcs to look at.

But the devs aren't neccesarily looking at only 5 star arcs nor are they restricted to using the MA interface to find them... They can access the database.

There's nothing to stop them using bespoke queries to find arcs that may be promising - e.g. find me any arcs that have had 50 4+ votes in the past 2 days...

IIRC the devs have stated that they want devs choice to be an alternate way to find good arcs. The poor, trusting devs still think that the HoF will work and so they don't need to give devs choice to arcs that are doing well with player ratings.

I think it's more likely that they'll do the odd bespoke query or just browse a few arcs that haven't been played by many but stand out with a quirky name or info. This'll be their shortlist for the day/week and if any strike them as really good then they'll dev choice it. I think that because it's what I'd do if I was in their position.

I personally expect the best source of feedback will turn out to be a third party site allowing much better categorisation, ratings, author comments and reviews and comments (possibly covering both private/public and 2-way exchange between author and commentator).

The ingame communications aren't geared up to comment/review cycles and especially not between the US and EU. And the MA v1.0 browser is, IMO, far below the standard I expected. It's months since I made it clear here that I believed the success of the MA to be directly tied to the ability to search available arcs for content that will appeal to you.

I was working on some ideas but RL circumstances got in the way, and so now I'm keeping an eye on City Of Guides MA listing/reviews. It's basic just now, and doesn't yet appear to have search functionality, but at least it allows good length comments/reviews.

Yet the complaints system shows that they had a system working that effectively attaches comments to the published arc itself. I'm pretty darn sure that this could have been modified to a general feedback system.

Interesting.

On test I had a decent amount of feedback - probably about 20 comments from about 60 ratings and who knows how many players. But on live I've had something like 6 to 8 comments from over 160 ratings and over 250 players...

I just thought that the population of test was obviously a lot better at giving feedback than the population of live!

Having said that: I did think that the number of comments I received on test fell off dramatically when it went to global tells rather than emails... Maybe tells have always been dodgy, but if some tests get delivered ok we don't question it further...

I say maintenance/patch as I expect that the servers probably need patching to deal with the bug that's caused this (the emergency maintenance period).

I'm not saying that a client-side patch will be required, nor that it won't!

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
My favourite moment so far was when I entered a mission (a cargo ship) to discover that there were NO mobs at all...
My immediate reaction was 'oh oh!'
Was great!

[/ QUOTE ]
Was that a bug? If not, I'm really wanting to know how that was pulled off.

[/ QUOTE ]
It's possible as an intended act - I do it on an arc I've had kicking about locally for about 2 weeks...

Look here for some answers/clues.

If you mean you looked c.9am you just missed it - I put it back at c.09:30 BST and it was still showing as OK at c.12:30...

But, of course, the servers are now down for maintenance, so that doesn't help you much!

I fully expect this maintenance/patch to do nothing about problems of vanishing mobs and arcs wrongly marked as invalid... but at least as a pessimist I have a chance of being pleasantly surprised!

[ QUOTE ]
Could it be because someone clicked the "Report for Content" button?

[/ QUOTE ]
I checked - my 1st thought was that maybe it had been autobanned. My second thought was that would mean a severe humour-failure on the part of at least 5 people...

But there was just the single complaint that it got almost as soon as it was published... with no complaint text (just the default 'enter complaint here' type text)... I think that that was a complaint in the mistaken belief that it was still being used for testing petitioning!

Gratz - Have a great cakeday!

Log on 30 min ago and the damn thing's done it again...

But a popup on login re: emergency maintenance for a arc server issue this afternoon (13:00 BST for 2 hrs). Hope that this bug is covered.

So Mrs JD wanted an insight to my mind and we just played through my Handyman arc fine.

Shortly after I'm browsing the list despairing at the number of imagination-challenged authors out there (how many 'play this drivel for 10 badges' arcs do we need?) and I notice that Handyman is not appearing in search anymore.

Swapping to my main account to see if it's been banned or something, I find that it is unavailable as 'One or more of your published arcs have been marked invalid. Most likely restrictions on published arcs were changed and your arc no longer meets the guidelines. You can fix the errors and republish.'

Rubbish - it was fine not 10 minutes earlier. The MA arc server hasn't declared itself unavailable. I've not edited the arc.

So I open the published arc for editing - no errors are showing. I immediately click republish and voila - it republishes without any complaint.

This is not the first time this has happened. Yesterday I had this happen 3 times each about 5 minutes apart. Refreshing my search it would be fine.. be fine.. be fine.. disappear and claim to be broken. But each time republishing without modification was fine.

Something is not WAI.

BTW - Anyone else seen this?