Suggestion: Reset quest average duration upon re-publishing

eldarth · October 2013

I have a feeling Average Quest Duration is based on:

Total Quest Time / Total Plays

If a quest is re-published, if new average duration is much higher than previously, the incremental difference added to Total Quest Time is essentially worthless by averaging it out over previous Total Plays.

Consider recalculating average quest duration as follows:

Total Time Since Published / Plays Since Published

And when quest is re-published, start by initializing

Total Time Since Published = Last Average
Plays Since Published = 1

This is especially needed since Foundry Quests are not eligible for Dailies unless they hit the 15 minute mark.
It becomes more and more difficult to adjust a quest when it's pre-hindered by being diluted by an average tied to an ever increasing Total Plays.

ephiroll · November 2013

I rather see this as an option for the author to make the choice. 'Republish' vs. 'clean publish' or something.

zebular · November 2013

. . . . . I don't think such a drastic measure is needed. Although, I would like to see the average only be gained from a set number of the most recent plays, not total plays. Like the last 500 plays. I currently have a mission, Act I of my campaign, that for a long time was only about 10-12 minutes long. Eventually, I decided to add in an optional side area into the objectives to try and increase it's average and now it takes about 20 minutes to complete. However, since it already had over 10,000 plays by that time when I updated it, it's going to take a few thousand more plays to get the average to change, which is pretty crazy.

Moderator Note: Bump removed, bumping is not allowed. Thanks!

celantra · November 2013

Think that 500 plays is too many as many quests don't get much more then a hundred or so. I would say the last 20 averaged would give a sufficient baseline.

zebular · November 2013

celantra wrote: »

Think that 500 plays is too many as many quests don't get much more then a hundred or so. I would say the last 20 averaged would give a sufficient baseline.

. . . . . 20 is too few and easily skewed and would cause far too frequent of fluctuations. 500 is far better as it gives less chance of being abused. . A minimum of 250 is the lowest I would be able to agree with. There's no reason to have the system fluctuate so frequently (20 plays) except for a major change. In which, I do like the sound of an author being able to "reset" their plays to start the average over from scratch. However, this should be something that should only be allowed to be done once every couple months on any given mission.

angrysprite · November 2013

The problem with depending on "popularity" of Foundry quests is the author's reliance on whether it will be played by the Dailies crowd. So what happens is the author tries hard to get their quest as close as possible to the 15-minute mark so it will qualify for the dailies, and be popular with the Foundry Daily Runners.

I made that mistake with Blacklake Luskan, which averaged 20-minutes for first-time players. But then the runners would repeat it often - and knowing every objective and the map intimately they blast through it like snot on teflon. This pushes the average play-time down. Now this quest no longer qualifies for the daily and hence, doesn't get any more plays, even though every single rating except two are all four and five stars. ~shrug~

I've learned to just not care about this aspect. I'm creating the quests I want to create for me. I've had my next chapter ready to publish since the end of September, but I just haven't pressed that button, yet (too lazy to run through Live Server tests on all my classes). I will, maybe this weekend. It's just not that important to me.

I will advertise it, mention it to everyone I meet, all that stuff. But in the end, those who play it will get to experience my own attention-to-detail and how carefully I like to craft my work. The average play-time in this one for first-timers I expect will be around the thirty-minute mark. So it will get very few plays because the Daily-Runners won't be interested because it takes too long for Daily-Running.

This is the problem with the "Average Play Time" stat: it's just NOT ACCURATE because of the Daily-Runners. As for what the Devs can do to fix this issue/problem/corruption/whatever - I don't have any answers. So I suppose the status quo will be status quo. The Devs have other, more important work to focus on than this.

This is only my own too sense, your mileage will vary, of course.

eldarth · November 2013

zebular wrote: »

. . . . . 20 is too few and easily skewed and would cause far too frequent of fluctuations. 500 is far better as it gives less chance of being abused. . A minimum of 250 is the lowest I would be able to agree with. There's no reason to have the system fluctuate so frequently (20 plays) except for a major change. In which, I do like the sound of an author being able to "reset" their plays to start the average over from scratch. However, this should be something that should only be allowed to be done once every couple months on any given mission.

I think "so frequently" differs drastically between our perspectives. Your thousands of plays are no doubt helped incredibly by actually being seen in the top few of any of the foundry search tabs. Whereas after about 6 months, I have, oh about, 20 plays. So ... 250 plays "sentences me" to a little over six years.

angrysprite wrote: »

The problem with depending on "popularity" of Foundry quests is the author's reliance on whether it will be played by the Dailies crowd. So what happens is the author tries hard to get their quest as close as possible to the 15-minute mark so it will qualify for the dailies, and be popular with the Foundry Daily Runners.

... knowing every objective and the map intimately they [daily runners] blast through it like snot on teflon. This pushes the average play-time down. Now this quest no longer qualifies for the daily and hence, doesn't get any more plays, even though every single rating except two are all four and five stars. ~shrug~
...
This is the problem with the "Average Play Time" stat: it's just NOT ACCURATE because of the Daily-Runners. As for what the Devs can do to fix this issue/problem/corruption/whatever...

Exactly. The Foundry search needs to be fixed. Rewards for "dailies" needs to be fixed. Until then (probably thousands of) foundry authors like me are doomed to total in-game invisibility and must beg for plays on forums, and perhaps litter zone chat with "ads" for our quests -- inevitably risking the spam hammer for a handful of users.

Fix the **** foundry search
Fix the **** foundry daily rewards
Recalculate average quest duration (over some "reasonable" # of plays)
...and have a nice day.

kellnaforian · December 2013

What about showing the total average time (as we have now) and then the average time for X% of last plays?

thylbanus · December 2013

I can go for the last 500.

eldarth · December 2013

thylbanus wrote: »

I can go for the last 500.

So, if I add lots of detail and expand the time of my quest from 15 minutes to an hour and get 25 plays month (I'm actually closer to 25 over 6 months), then it'll take nearly two years to "correct" the actual average playtime. All the while misrepresenting the length of the quest and probably causing many, many people to simply quit playing it after 25-30 minutes thereby not even affecting the average and those that do "stick it out" for the full hour leaving 1-star reviews griping that it took them an hour for their 15-minute "daily" ? (So, in my case that'd be closer to 10 years to correct the average.)

Or, conversely, suppose I streamline the quest because it is taking longer than the desired 15-minute magical daily encouraged time-frame and strip out some unnecessary encounters, and dialogue cutting it from 40 minutes down to 20. Once again, I'm screwed for a couple of years before people finally see it closer to the magical 15-minute time.

orangefiree · December 2013

Why do a percentage, lets say the most recent 10% plays count for the average duration. If the quest has 5,000 plays it uses the last 500, if it has 50, it uses the last 5.

eldarth · December 2013

How about a moving average over the last two months -- however many plays that involves.

casmelak · January 2014

+1

Agreed. Although I think that there would need to be a sliding scale...more like the vote/ranking now. Where new plays have more effect on the time rating than earlier ones before the latest publish.

doc4goth · January 2014

ephiroll wrote: »

I rather see this as an option for the author to make the choice. 'Republish' vs. 'clean publish' or something.

As a non-author ATM I have a question in regards to this subject. Does republishing move your quest back into the "For Review" category? If so would not simply publishing the Quest under a new name reset the the number of plays and the average duration? In effect doing exactly what ephiroll suggested above.

orangefiree · January 2014

doc4goth wrote: »

As a non-author ATM I have a question in regards to this subject. Does republishing move your quest back into the "For Review" category? If so would not simply publishing the Quest under a new name reset the the number of plays and the average duration? In effect doing exactly what ephiroll suggested above.

No, the only way to do that is to duplicate the quest and publish the duplicate instead. That only works for people with foundry slots available though.

eldarth · January 2014

orangefiree wrote: »

No, the only way to do that is to duplicate the quest and publish the duplicate instead. That only works for people with foundry slots available though.

And since quest duplication is soooo risky, it could take many, many hours to "fix" whatever duplication broke or shifted assuming you could even be sure you found it all. If duplication weren't so buggy, this might be a viable workaround - withdraw original, duplicate, publish duplicate.

beckylunatic · January 2014

orangefiree wrote: »

Why do a percentage, lets say the most recent 10% plays count for the average duration. If the quest has 5,000 plays it uses the last 500, if it has 50, it uses the last 5.

This is pretty much what I was thinking, some way to make it weigh more heavily on recent plays while taking into account the total number of plays.

Suggestion: Reset quest average duration upon re-publishing

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