Can you dispute bad reviews? Probably not.

arkanarge · May 2018

Got bombarded with a bunch of 1 star trolls. Makes me feel bad v_v. That'll teach me to be proud of my work. HUHRUMF. NAH.

Soo..... the 5 star review system is kinda lame too. I would still be at 5 full stars if it weren't for 1 troll out of like 45 people. Now I got a bunch more and ratings dropped like crazy. You can't fight these guys at all can you? To recover from a 1 star review you need like 15 5 star reviews. The averaging is crazy. Normal foundry makers can't fight these kinds of trolls unless we're featured so that so many people play it doesn't even matter. 1 bad review can ruin a person.

arkanarge · May 2018

*hyper ventilates* AGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Whewwww.... its okay v_v I'm okay........... huff huff heww... tempted to confront them because you can see their account names but thats just a hugely bad idea. The 2 1 stars reviews at the same time were definitely friends and who knows how many more they'll get to attack me if I confront them. We're kinda helpless, the only thing saving us is nice people and that people don't care enough about foundry. Including the cryptic. So theres nothing to be done about this and I'm just ranting to get it out of my system. If they do remove troll reviews, it would take alot of work and if they started doing it, then everyone would start petitioning over every last little thing which would anger them even further.

kreatyve · May 2018

Yeah, I don't recommend you feed the trolls. I have forwarded the thread though I'm not sure what all they can do about it.

arkanarge · May 2018

I can accept 1 stars if they explained why, like they absolutely hated it. That itself is educational and I'll learn from it. These ones are trolls who want to teach me a lesson for advertising foundry in zone chat because they deemed it as "spam" (structured like a guild recruitment) and don't care much about what I have to offer. Which I might add, I do only do once or twice every day, hours apart...... Well, at least they still played it. They may have had fun but their agenda was sabotage. We all know you can't go into an foundry as a group anymore, you get separated into 2 different instances, the work around is tedious and annoying. These trolls entered at the same time, separately. While talking to each other in order to post a review and the second one being able to answer that review. There is no way someone would go in, pull up the quest in catalogs and refresh for the review to come up and then answer that review. So I conclude that it was a planned and coordinated slander.

I spent quite some effort improving and polishing based on the critique of near 100 players who have so generously donated their time. I whole heartily don't think it deserves to be destroyed by trolls like these.

It could be also considered a form of bullying to discourage foundry authors from being more active in the community. Thus killing off the few that we have left. We're all proud of our works and if it is justified many of us can understand but I really don't like hateful people getting their way and "winning". Several of us have taken it upon our selves to advertise the foundry and remind people it exists, we've all have had our share of backlash as well as grateful people. Though people saying that your foundry is trash or that foundry is trash in general and that your muted by them is perfectly acceptable. Until they go out of their way, and even getting friends in on it to ruin your passion is unacceptable. They have all the power and there is nothing we can do.

I saw an amazing story quests that go against the norm with unique gameplay and even warned players that the quest has no combat and text heavy, gets 1 star for "too much text, no fighting" That, you can chock it up to a inconsiderate player and an albeit...(is that a word?) acceptable 1 star review... I guess? He's dumb, nothing you can do about it. You can remedy this by making an invisible text wall in the quest itself and warn them a second time. After that anyone who proceeds is on their own... Its something tangible. Something you can learn from and fix.

I think GMS can remove reviews because what if someone writes something racist or offensive that goes against the game rules. The only thing is, do they want to?

Like, if I really hated someone, you could easily make multiple accounts and leave 1 star reviews. No defense what so ever against a campaign like that. For every 1 star, the author could drop an entire half star. A masterpiece of a quest, months of work trying to bring people content, becomes a 3 star quest and avoided by the public after 4-5 runs. Taking months/years to recover if anyone is willing to give it a chance after then. Luckily no one cares enough about the foundry to attempt this. But since this is an issue, I would wish GMs be able to look into these situations and just delete troll reviews when asked, making everyone happy and we can all get back to work without being filled with anxiety.

iandarksword · May 2018

Unfortunately, the internet doesn't come with a maturity requirement. There are always 1-star people out there, reasons for them vary as widely as the individuals. People have 1-starred my quests for reasons given such as : complete jibberish or randomly typed letters, random punctuation involving no text whatsoever, the end loot, the sparkly trail disappeared, the player discarded a quest specific item and had to start again, players were under/overgeared, and various other nonsensical reasons. Don't take it personally, in every batch there are bad apples and other such metaphors.

arkanarge · May 2018

I get it and I understand.... Until a troll guy asks his friends to go into the foundry specifically to help him 1 star me at the same time... for fun. It isn't inconsiderate players who don't know any better, it was out of malice. AGHHHhhh.

Something to stop the people who "I'm going to 1 star your HAMSTER quest" you in tell when your talking about it in zone chat with a bunch of other people. It is a threat that they can and will pull off and some of us don't have the luxury to shrug it off. We gotta draw the line somewhere.... I hope. We can mute these type of people but we can't defend against their other attacks. I think its quite unfair for a quest to have no fighting chance when a troll decides to 1 star it from the start.

I can overlook 1 stars even if it hurts my soul, if cryptic really can't do anything about it. I just want to get this option on the table in the future for other authors. That would be a nice step forward.

So all in all, since foundry is a little low on authors right now. We need to work on helping good quests bubble up to the top and make sure they don't get lost in the best catalogs. We need fresh blood and stop relying on the glory days. With this, if its possible to dispute these troll reviews will consistently keep the newer quest with 40-80 reviews with 80-200 players, that deserve more recognition, push them towards the top. They will rise up and people can access them faster without clicking "load more" 20 times. I was surprised by how many good quests were in the 300-600th place in the catalogs behind the myriad of fast quests and loot quests, behind the featured quest and 2-3 copies of the same quest, behind the hustle and bustle... is a hole in the wall Michelin restaurant run by a mom and pop. So cozy. Such gems.

I bit the bullet and I asked support about it and they didn't dismiss it outright. They said they would get someone to look into it... probably.

arkanarge · May 2018

Update: they didn't care.

valcontar73 · May 2018

At first I was bothered by the 1-star reviews, but you must look at the overall result over the time. If there are more 5 stars than 1-stars reviews, you're doing right, for the kind of public you're working for, for those who likes what you like. Only remember "different strokes for different folks".

And as the number of players who play your foundries increases, the more 1-star reviews you'll get, but also 3-stars, 4-stars and 5-stars reviews. Learn from the last ones and discard the 1-star reviews.

sandukutupu · May 2018

It has been my opinion, that reviews in the game are out dated and over rated. The whole system is wrong, when you have the highest ranked game in the #1 spot, only because it is the oldest. Let me bounce my "ideal system" off you.

The author would post their work and after several automation bots on the server ran test runs for; getting stuck, unable to finish, and finishing too quick (eliminates fast review), it would get published for 3 (not 5) user reviews. There would be no star system only a written review and categories. The players would find this work in a random quest que and the reward would be a weekly 4,500 AD. The random quest would need the 15 minute qualifier, and has not been flagged as broken by the automated system. The author could still ask people to play and view their work in the catalog. Also to ensure the author "cares" about their work, they would need to login every 30 days for inspection or it gets archived and is no longer in the "public eye". Creating a Foundry quest would cost the author 5,000 AD to create one (AD sink + showing they care). The random que system would randomly sort the titles and play each out over the period of a month or until it hit the end, shuffle and repeat. This makes the Foundry equal opportunity and not some AD farm.

That has been my "ideal system" for a while now, it won't be implemented, but is a nice dream.

arkanarge · May 2018

I don't think bots will be able to test foundry quests. I think bots work by having specific routes and actions mapped out by hundreds of players providing information about it (like self driving cars), or the bot maker running it several times and tweaking it. They run on a specific path unless scripted otherwise. It works because stuff doesn't change in the mmorpg world. The path will always be the same and the mobs always in the same area. The only thing that changes are the players that run around. So I don't think cryptic has any in house bot programs or have the manpower to create them.

The AD fee might be... interesting? 5k ad is cheap and affordable but perhaps unnecessary but since it costs something, alot of people would pay the cheap fee just out of curiosity and take a look into the foundry editor. Some may be interested, some not. With a fee, there might be a slight increase in foundry authors who never bothered to look into it before. Like they say, if its expensive, it must be good. Or something like that.

A foundry quest weekly would be pretty good. Not too overpowered but to do this, they need to shuffle the best quest list or everyone will default to "tired of being the hero" People are more likely to play new quests every week if its the first thing they see. It'll introduce thousands of players again into the foundry. Some will see it as a chore, it'll reintroduce the foundry to noobies who don't even know it exists, some will get into it and start playing others by them selves. Whatever comes, I think a 4.5k ad weekly reward would be a low effort/high reward thing for cryptic to implement. Since its weekly the players won't feel like foundry is a chore, grinding 3 every day like before. Even I hated that. They can play a new one every week, a breath of fresh air and since its just one time per week they'll play new ones even if its a bit longer because, heck its only once a week. Kinda like making a fat person go to the gym once per week instead of everyday. They may dread the day it comes but are more likely to do it because its just once. Then they'll realize maybe working out isn't that bad. Just make that kobold give the weekly quest again.

Basically, 3 things that will revive the foundry with minimum effort on cryptic. Shuffling the best tab. Weekly foundry quest, just do 1; for 4.5k. Manually remove fast/loot quests based on the naming.

Shuffling the best tab will just be a few lines of code. The weekly 4.5k AD injection into the economy needs to be calculated due to the multitudes of farming alts but overall, probably not much of a difference. If the foundry editor is just a really watered down version of what the official developers use, It'll seem that making a new quest would involve drag and dropping down a new NPC and typing out the quest while giving the parameters. Lastly, all a gm needs to do is to spend 40 minutes deleting "fast quests" by just searching the fast quest/loot quest into the search, or scrolling down sifting through 900 quests in the best tab. It'll take like an hour. Removing it because it does not follow the guidelines.

Or you know, have quests with 0 minutes automatically get deleted or fail publish.

sandukutupu · June 2018

@arkanarge
Automation (bots) on the server side would work differently from the ones players abuse. There would be no "3D client" needed. It could run 100 artificial runs on the script and send you the results by game mail within a short time. Such as; 30% of the runs got stuck on door number 204, then you would know you have problems with the door. The automation would find secret shortcuts because viewing the script there are no secrets. The report back on that would look something like; 95% of the runs finished your quest in less than 3 minutes. But you are correct the issue is budget, and they refuse to spend money on improving the editor, so why would they fix the whole system.

AD fee was something I paid on Star Trek so why not here? I had to collect 10K in crystals just to "buy in" to the editor. Then later I tossed in $20 of real cash to get more characters slots (ST used real characters not the generic one you get in NW) and purchase more quest slots. People still make Foundries on ST and they still pay crystals to do so. To the best of my knowledge the ST version still gives players crystals for playing qualified daily Foundries.

manufracture · June 2018

arkanarge said:
Got bombarded with a bunch of 1 star trolls. Makes me feel bad v_v. That'll teach me to be proud of my work. HUHRUMF. NAH.

Soo..... the 5 star review system is kinda lame too. I would still be at 5 full stars if it weren't for 1 troll out of like 45 people. Now I got a bunch more and ratings dropped like crazy. You can't fight these guys at all can you? To recover from a 1 star review you need like 15 5 star reviews. The averaging is crazy. Normal foundry makers can't fight these kinds of trolls unless we're featured so that so many people play it doesn't even matter. 1 bad review can ruin a person.

I must say, when I read your post I went and played your quest, I laughed so much in it. You are seriously talented, don't let the trolls get you down.

Can you dispute bad reviews? Probably not.

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