SpittingTrashcan

Allow me to elaborate on this, since a fair amount of the conversation is nibbling at the symptoms of the star system.

First, stars are bad because they don't ask a clear question. There is no reference as to what qualifies an arc for a given star rating. Players are invited to make these qualifications up for themselves. Is an arc that you enjoyed and would play again, but wasn't perfect, a five star arc or a four star arc? Is an arc that you didn't regret playing but won't play again a four star or a three star? Is an arc you personally didn't enjoy as a matter of taste but can't find technical fault with a three star or a two star? Players are left to come up with a personal (and wildly variable) mapping from their nuanced opinion to a number between 1 and 5. This would actually be useful information if players were tracking how a specific fellow player's tastes matched theirs; over time they would learn what to expect from an arc which that specific player gave a given rating. But that is not how the information is being used. Instead, it is being aggregated into a simple average. That's bad.

And the reason it's bad is because that simple average is then being used to create a sort ordering, with no other information involved. And that opens up the potential to, whether intentionally or not, grossly overweight an outlier rating. It's been mentioned numerous times before that it requires 7 five star ratings for each 1 star rating to keep an arc above the critical 4.5 average threshold. That 1 star could be an honest opinion, or it could be a griefer. It actually doesn't matter in the same way that it doesn't matter whether a mine is detonated accidentally or maliciously: the problem is that the mine was there to detonate in the first place.

For a case study on how star systems have fared elsewhere, see the link in my sig. Once users figure out that the stars, and the way they are used to sort items, amount in effect to one "like" and four strengths of "dislike", they skip the ambiguous middle options and go straight to the ones that push the item most strongly in the direction they prefer. At that point, you basically have a dysfunctional like/dislike rating system anyway, and you may as well just make the change, make explicit what was implicit, and start aggregating the results and ordering items in a sane fashion.

Here's one sane ordering algorithm. I didn't come up with it; smarter people did, and used it to make a lot of money while I posted on video game forums. It's alive and well in the field right now. The numbers can stand some tweaking, but the core of the algorithm is that items rise in the list by being new and well received, and fall by being old or poorly received. It's crucial to note that the rating value is a sum that increases linearly with positive ratings, not an average that increases asymptotically and can be drastically reduced with disproportionately few ratings (and vice versa, although that's less of an issue in this case).

TL;DR: Stars are ambiguous and mathematically bad.

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That... was not the smartest thing they've ever done. Well, so much for merit reform - they'll never get away with rolling this reward back now that they've granted it. *headdesk*

The suggestions are listed such that each one requires the prior ones. The overall thrust is to roll back merits to remove all the ways that they differ from the old random roll system except for the two crucial parts: that you can pick the level of the recipe, and that different TFs can award different levels of credit toward rolls. The developers do have a tendency, when rebuilding a system to address a problem, to elaborate with features that create new problems, and so it is with the implementation of merits which have created a noticeable supply issue with sub-cap pool C/D recipes due to rolls at cap, merits being scattered among alts, merits being spent inefficiently, and merits not being spent at all. Hence the suggestions.

Also, unrelatd to the OP, but the link in your sig? I need to put that in my sig. Anyone who cares about the state of the markets post-GR needs to put that in their sig. And the devs really need to read that article.

okay enough of this lovefest

This is all correct. Date last updated is a more useful metric.

I have no idea, actually. If it's not, then never mind. If they can be edited but then lose HoF status, that is somewhat awkward, but if the arc slot rewarded by HoF is retained even if the arc loses HoF, then it's not as big an issue.

I have never understood exactly what scenario the developers are trying to prevent through edit-locking DC arcs. The one I see most frequently mentioned is that the author can achieve DC, then edit the arc into something abusive/offensive/etcetera. But the high visibility of DC arcs means that any such activity would be very quickly detected, reported, and punished. About the only scenario I can see where an author who had previously been dedicated enough to their craft to make a DC worthy arc would later give their patrons a very public insult would be if they were displeased with the devs and decided to make a dramatic exit, which... oh, right. Hm.

Seriously, what does this solution not address? Badges that can be earned at any time can be re-earned at any time. Badges that could only be earned under one set of circumstances that will never come again should be account-wide.

Commenting only on this: I've asked about it before, and apparently this is simply not possible under the current game engine.

So what you're saying is, "nobody will be playing villain content, except for all the people playing villain content."

I predict that lots of people will continue to play redside content - it's still as good as it's ever been and now it's more accessible. That won't stop people complaining about content they don't like as if it were content they can't access, though. And aspects of the game that remain mutually exclusive, such as the red and blue economies, will experience strong and potentially detrimental network effects because of their actual (as opposed to perceived) mutual exclusivity.