Thanks! Really, all I'm hoping for is for Cryptic to consider these issues while the game is still in the development phase, and try to address them before launch.
A lot of people have invested a lot of time (the developers, publishers and the community) to creating a successful game and user-generated content is an integral part of that success. If the 4-5 star system was the only way of finding good content then we would have a problem, but with all the ideas that have been offered here, I have no fear whatsoever that the good stuff will be lost because it is our (the community) passion that will provide the sanity check in ensuring everyone else knows what the best stuff is, through tags, fansite reviews, forums posts, blogs, fanzines, email and all the other ideas!
If I understand correctly, you are saying that it's the community's job to come up with solutions. I definitely agree with that -- while the active forum and 3rd-party site communities may be insignificantly tiny compared to the playerbase as a whole, we have the power to improve the system either by highlighting the biggest problems to the developers and suggesting solutions (such as this thread), and coming up with author workarounds for unaddressed problems whenever possible.
Even in a worst-case scenario (COH), the community can do its part to make the system more usable: make recommendation lists, host contests, 5-star story-heavy quests to counteract griefing, create and maintain review sites, etc. It is just that these activities unfortunately have a limited effect on the general playerbase (however, they are VERY useful for authors).
I don't mind the rating system, but the star system frankly stinks, because players are low-rating good modules because of bugs with the engine.
My main issue with the rating system is that it really does need a lot of people to play ALL content in the Foundry for ratings to become effective. It IS a good system if - like gillrmn said - you can guarantee that every single quest gets played by a good number of people (say, 500+). To reach THAT, you need ways to somewhat equalize exposure between the proven high-end stories and the unknown ones, while realizing that most players will want to play it safe and don't want to risk spending an hour of their life playing something that has a high probability of being bad. I'd also add a suggestion to lightly incentivize players to actually vote - maybe give them a small amount of copper/silver if they select a rating and write a comment after they've finished a quest for the first time? This could also be used to get them to participate in more elaborate rating schemes like the 'tag rating' one.
Getting downrated due to engine bugs is infuriating. I had my own work one-starred a few times in COH (and that storyarc could never break out of the 4-star hell because of those 1-stars) because of an elusive bug in one of the maps causing a boss to rarely (about 1 time out of 10) spawn in an unreachable location. The bug may have been fixed in a later patch, but by then it was too late.
Ultimately, I think players need to be aware that bug-free operation is not always in the control of the author and not downrate content because of perceived bugginess. Having a more nuanced voting system (such as the "vote for each tag" system proposed earlier in this thread) would definitely help with this... the player could vote 1 for the technical "tag", and 5 for story. Or there may even be a drop-down box (or similar UI element) on the voting screen with values such as:
I did not complete the quest because it was not enjoyable (if the player cancelled the quest early)
I did not complete the quest due to a bug (see above)
I completed the quest (this would be set if the player completed the quest, and the drop-down would be greyed out)
which would also be shown next to ratings.
Another idea is that you could choose to 'report a bug' instead of rating the quest, which would cause your comment to be highlighted in a different color on the quest's info screen to warn possible future players that there may be a bug in the quest that blocks progress. Of course this would open avenues to griefing, you'd need to figure out how such bug reports could be removed (maybe if X people successfully complete a playthrough?), etc etc.
but I would just like to throw another idea on the table... why not make content that YOU and YOUR FRIENDS would like to play and let the masses hustle in the pit of madness?
Music to my ears and this inevitably is what a lot of us do.
For many reasons, for one it can actually narrow your focus and produce more entertainment, because you can cater the adventure to a known group of players, even sometimes referencing things you know they did in the past. It feels personalized, special and much more like a tabletop session that way.
Secondly, it allows you to move new modules in while taking old modules out, the slots you have to publish are usually limited, so keeping things up for a long time in hopes they "catch on" gets in the way of providing content to your guild and friends.
Finally, promoting your content to become top rated is a real chore. It involves a lot schilling and begging for people to play. It can really distract from the enjoyment of the game.
As for whether "cream rises to the top", well you see, that's precisely the point. This IS a way to ensure the cream rises to the top, if you define "top" as "finding adventures I want to play and making adventures I like to make". If you simply mean, "how do you make sure the best modules are the also the most popular", you can't do it.
You can't do it, because in order to become popular, you have to work hard at being popular, which can often mean, your quality is diluted a little in order to achieve it. Again, think of how some of the best literature ever written was panned. The Great Gatsby was a bust when it was published. Now I don't liken a D&D module to Fitzgerald, but a best seller, must be molded as a best seller from the start, no matter what medium your dealing in (film, novel, or music).
I don't think those who want their modules to become "top modules" will be disappointed. In time, if you are dedicated to that notion, you'll learn what "sells" a module, you'll learn how to promote your product, you'll forge the relationships necessary to get your work noticed. Which is all important work, because good popular modules make the game better and richer. So we are thankful for the authors who promote their work tirelessly.
However, what I am more concerned about is finding what *I* like. And I think many of us have the same concern. I don't look at the problem from the producer's standpoint. A producer who wants to get noticed, will get noticed. I worry more about finding that one petunia in the onion patch, with the petunia meaning an adventure that matches my taste, rather than what the rest of the community considers "great".
That's not to be elitist either, my taste is very suspect believe me. I like the rock band KISS, so any question of taste from me is immediately disqualified. But I know my taste is a little unique.
Which is why, I again, hope there's eventually a system to "like" certain authors (or follow them like twitter), and I hope there's specific comma delimited search tags we can attach to modules. Certain key words, much like hashtags, could really help filter out adventures that you know belong to a campaign or story or theme.
The more you can personalize the experience the better, to me, that's the REAL strength of UGC, it's the fact it produces so much content, you can eventually cater it all to your precise taste.
My humble wooden nickel on the subject.
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I think all foundry quests should have their stars reset on launch of "Open Beta". Game bugs that caused low scores during alpha/closed beta should not cost those authors their rep.IMO
Definitely agree that there needs to be a way to search for "new" content, "specific" content(RP, Lore, Survival, Heavy Story, Fetch)
Would like to see some sort of "Up-n-Coming" or "One to Watch" or "Rising Star" tag for author or content.(as suggested in this thread)
A specific filter that shows "kin content" or content by people on your "friends list" would also help a lot. Especially for RPers.
Otherwise keep up the good work all.
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jezathforumMember, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Guardian UsersPosts: 0Arc User
edited March 2013
the greifing obstacle could be overcome by an appropriatley deterring level of punishment for false bug reports.
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I understand the original poster's concerns with "five star hell" - this is actually an issue with a lot of rating systems. For example, Amazon has star ratings and so does eBay. New items can easily be sent to the top of the list with one or two five stars, leaving products with hundreds of four or five ratings ranked lower. I can't stand these systems because the more ratings, the more accurate the score.
The way to resolve this is by having different search categories and changing the rating structure. Rather than averaging the star ratings of all users, add them together. So if a quest had 20 users rate it a five, that quest would have 100 points. Let us sort by the number of points. You could also allow negative ratings; the scoring range would be from -5 to +5 so that as time goes on, the score can reflect any changing opinions.
Have different search categories:
New quests (30 days or less) with most points per day
New quests (30 days or less) with most points
Quests with most points
Quests wirh most points per day
Quests with highest donations
Quests that my friends rated highest
I would prefer a toggle option to change the timeframe I am looking for. For example, I can hit 30 days for quests in the last month or 60 days or 15 days or 90 days, etc.
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grayvenrayneMember, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Guardian UsersPosts: 19Arc User
edited March 2013
Funny.. I've never worried much about how folks would find good missions, I'm still focused on being able to make them. So little info is out there about what's available, it may not matter at all who made what if the only difference is quest text. Right now the bar for custom creation seems to be 'Does the mission have an actual goal, and can you actually get there without a zone-crashing bug?'
For example, I'd love to know if I will be able to..
- script a boss mob attack sequence, saving certain attacks until a specific situation.
- spawn in-fight events based on whether players accomplish something (like requiring the group to throw a switch when the boss is 50% health to avoid a flood of adds)
- randomize the location of certain hidden items when the zone is instantiated
- have conversation choices in an early discussion affect the conversation options later in the mission (if you're hostile towards a gnoll sentry, the cave of gnolls won't let you enter their lair near the end)
- implement traps in a true D&D fashion.. some wound, some sleep, and some kill.
- cast illusion spells on characters than change their appearance, and change how mobs interact with them
- have NPCs that can be added to the group, at least as followers, and then have some later event or fight cause them to switch to hostile or leave.
These are the first few requirements I hit when planning out a PnP module conversion, and so far I haven't discovered a resource where these sorts of questions are answered. If anyone has any links to reading material, I'd appreciate it.
just wanted to add my support for this thread. It is an important issue, and I wont go into detail as to WHY it is important, since that would be atleast a long a post as the OP.
But tagging is a good start, and will help me to find quests I would like to consume as well. But I want heaps of tags, not just 5 to 10 topics. But maby 50. (featuring what culture: drow, mix, dwarves ets, hidden areas?, story presented through text or MrBean style?) etc
I think all foundry quests should have their stars reset on launch of "Open Beta". Game bugs that caused low scores during alpha/closed beta should not cost those authors their rep.IMO
I would like to echo this as well, this would benefit the authors that had their quest rated low due to client issues should not be penalized for this. It would put everyone on an even playing field and would have the same chances of rating high as the next author.
This Is a fantastic thread and I hope it continues to spawn new or at least reinforce the need for a better system.
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dvscalesingerMember, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Guardian UsersPosts: 0Arc User
edited March 2013
I know I devoted almost all of my time once I got into Neverwinter to doing foundry missions and reviewing them honestly. Why not have there be a group of "volunteers" that foundry authors could use BEFORE officially launching the content to get honest reviews and feedback so they can tweak it before launch. On that note the volunteers can have a button on there profile others can click on to go through the reviews they've given and get ideas of which UGC they want to play. I know personally I'm going to support those who are doing a great job regardless of how many stars they have with the "donate" button.
One pet peeve of mine is to get into a quest that gave the wrong suggested lvl and never mentions you'll be slaughtered and stuck in the quest if you don't party for it. Just throwing that out there!
Finally, promoting your content to become top rated is a real chore. It involves a lot schilling and begging for people to play. It can really distract from the enjoyment of the game.
As for whether "cream rises to the top", well you see, that's precisely the point. This IS a way to ensure the cream rises to the top, if you define "top" as "finding adventures I want to play and making adventures I like to make". If you simply mean, "how do you make sure the best modules are the also the most popular", you can't do it.
You can't do it, because in order to become popular, you have to work hard at being popular, which can often mean, your quality is diluted a little in order to achieve it. Again, think of how some of the best literature ever written was panned. The Great Gatsby was a bust when it was published. Now I don't liken a D&D module to Fitzgerald, but a best seller, must be molded as a best seller from the start, no matter what medium your dealing in (film, novel, or music).
Yes, marketing was always a problem in COH. You were expected to shill for your creations everywhere (forums, chat channels, zone chat, even party chat while grouping) because otherwise they would simply not get played ever. And still, in the later years, even that did little more than nothing unless you were already well-known. As an example, my last story arc was published in October of 2011 (its ID was around 525000, to give an idea of the amount of content it was 'competing with'). I marketed it in the following ways:
Friends and guildies (duh)
Posted on the forums under its own thread
Posted on the forums in the "announce your story arc" thread
Posted on the forums in my primary server (Virtue, one of the largest COH server)'s sticky "MA missions by Virtue players" thread
Submitted it for review in 2 different places (that was about 50% of the entire review community back then, btw)
Participated with it in the "Arc Club", a community for authors where we played and discussed each other's arcs every month
The reviews, the arc club, and my friends + guildies got me 15 plays altogether. I got 3 plays that were unaccounted for, and I'm fairly sure they only found the arc because they played my permanent page-1 Dev's Choice arc (which received new plays very regularly still) and clicked on my name to find more stuff by me... I'm pretty sure I would've stalled out at 15 (ie. the people I explicitly asked to play the arc) if I was a 'normal' author.
The arc had a 5-star rating throughout its entire life, btw... in fact, I'm fairly sure it was at a 5.0 average for a looong while.
Which is why, I again, hope there's eventually a system to "like" certain authors (or follow them like twitter), and I hope there's specific comma delimited search tags we can attach to modules. Certain key words, much like hashtags, could really help filter out adventures that you know belong to a campaign or story or theme.
The more you can personalize the experience the better, to me, that's the REAL strength of UGC, it's the fact it produces so much content, you can eventually cater it all to your precise taste.
Exactly! Everyone has different tastes and intentions for UGC; the role of the entire interface should be to help match players' needs with the authors' offerings.
I understand the original poster's concerns with "five star hell" - this is actually an issue with a lot of rating systems. For example, Amazon has star ratings and so does eBay. New items can easily be sent to the top of the list with one or two five stars, leaving products with hundreds of four or five ratings ranked lower. I can't stand these systems because the more ratings, the more accurate the score.
That is one of the problems, yes -- such systems only work when everything has a large number of ratings. Ironically, the specific problem you mentioned would actually help very slightly here, since it'd put new content with a 5.0 average above older content.. at least until it got a single 4- or 3-star, at which point it'd disappear again.
The way to resolve this is by having different search categories and changing the rating structure. Rather than averaging the star ratings of all users, add them together. So if a quest had 20 users rate it a five, that quest would have 100 points. Let us sort by the number of points. You could also allow negative ratings; the scoring range would be from -5 to +5 so that as time goes on, the score can reflect any changing opinions.
Yeah, a variation of the 'like' or 'upvote' system (e.g. stack overflow) instead of star rating would work better in general. I'm just worried that it's too late in development to do changes to the rating system on such a basic level. Also, while a point system would be more resilient against downvoting griefing and such, it's even more vulnerable to the momentum problem -- after some time you'd have some content with thousands of points sitting in front, and they'd basically stay there forever. You'd also need to be mindful of mass-upvoting, which is a bit harder to detect in a point system.
New quests (30 days or less) with most points per day
New quests (30 days or less) with most points
Quests with most points
Quests wirh most points per day
Quests with highest donations
Quests that my friends rated highest
I would prefer a toggle option to change the timeframe I am looking for. For example, I can hit 30 days for quests in the last month or 60 days or 15 days or 90 days, etc.
I agree -- it is a good thing to have a separate queue for new content (whether it's a time-frame or a tag that defines content as 'new'), and it needs to be accomplished in some way that still allows people to look at tried-and-true content if they want. I'm not sure how this'd fit into the UI (tabs? search field with a drop-down? different windows, even?), but that's Cryptic's job anyway.
But tagging is a good start, and will help me to find quests I would like to consume as well. But I want heaps of tags, not just 5 to 10 topics. But maby 50. (featuring what culture: drow, mix, dwarves ets, hidden areas?, story presented through text or MrBean style?) etc
Pretty much, yeah. I imagine you'd need some auto-generated tags to go with the ones set by the author:
Something like the number / type of enemy groups and other types of objectives could be shown, so if someone doesn't like ambushes or escorts, they can avoid the specific quest... also, the info window could display other metadata like the presence of secret doors, whether any specific class skills are needed/useful, if there are any tough custom bosses, etcetera. This could be easily turned into tags that the user can search for. Ideally the search system would SAVE the user's tag preferences locally so s/he doesn't have to enter it every time. Heck, the system could even auto-generate tags like "combat-heavy" (at least x number of combats per map) and "lore-heavy" (at least y interactable items). As long as these tags would only be used for searching, there'd be no point in trying to exploit the system -- sure, you could fool it by creating 50 empty lore items and copy/pasting Lorem Ipsum in their descriptions, but all you'd accomplish is some story-seekers coming to play your quest, becoming disappointed, and downvoting it.
I know I devoted almost all of my time once I got into Neverwinter to doing foundry missions and reviewing them honestly. Why not have there be a group of "volunteers" that foundry authors could use BEFORE officially launching the content to get honest reviews and feedback so they can tweak it before launch. On that note the volunteers can have a button on there profile others can click on to go through the reviews they've given and get ideas of which UGC they want to play. I know personally I'm going to support those who are doing a great job regardless of how many stars they have with the "donate" button.
One pet peeve of mine is to get into a quest that gave the wrong suggested lvl and never mentions you'll be slaughtered and stuck in the quest if you don't party for it. Just throwing that out there!
While this is an admirable initiative (especially since Foundry playtime is time-limited), unfortunately I don't think it can cope with the massive number of content that'll be coming out after launch. It's the nature of the (symmetrical UGC) beast.
I still think it's a great idea, though -- there'll be many authors without much Foundry experience (especially at launch for obvious reasons), and having a sort of vetting process for a segment of the author-base could really help in getting them up to speed and letting them unleash their true potential.
aldinvinedaMember, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Guardian UsersPosts: 14Arc User
edited March 2013
Great thread Zaph and everyone else who's contributed so far.
There's some really valuable info for those like me who want to start creating content.
I'd like to reinforce to Cryptic what was said about refining the filters more than the actual Foundry mechanics.
I'm sure it's comparatively easy, all things considered, to tweak them and enable users to find UGC that they'll enjoy regardless of what they define 'enjoyable' as.
selentiMember, Neverwinter Beta UsersPosts: 1Arc User
edited March 2013
Is the limited Foundry playtime something they're set on as a design goal? Because... well, reading a lot of these concerns, something occurs to me. The problem may not be so much finding what you want, but that people just aren't interested in Foundry missions in general.
Throw all the factors together: Limited play-time, lesser loot than just doing normal missions, no parity with 5 mans, let alone raids, and I just see a glaring case of "Why would anyone bother?". Obviously it's problematic if the majority of good content isn't even findable by those who want to find it, but when you have a mission like yours that was apparently dev-chosen for years and only managed to hit 70 reviews, I get the feeling that the % of total players of the game actually interested in playing Foundry content is miniscule (less than 1% after the first few times, in other words).
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zaphtasticMember, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Guardian Users, SilverstarsPosts: 0Arc User
Is the limited Foundry playtime something they're set on as a design goal? Because... well, reading a lot of these concerns, something occurs to me. The problem may not be so much finding what you want, but that people just aren't interested in Foundry missions in general.
Throw all the factors together: Limited play-time, lesser loot than just doing normal missions, no parity with 5 mans, let alone raids, and I just see a glaring case of "Why would anyone bother?". Obviously it's problematic if the majority of good content isn't even findable by those who want to find it, but when you have a mission like yours that was apparently dev-chosen for years and only managed to hit 70 reviews, I get the feeling that the % of total players of the game actually interested in playing Foundry content is miniscule (less than 1% after the first few times, in other words).
Yeah, they mention limiting Foundry playtime to 4 hours a day in the GDC talk "to limit exploiting". You can play after you hit the limit, but won't get any rewards. Realistically, most people play less than 4 hours a day on average -- but if someone is on a reviewing binge, that pretty much limits you to ~3-4 story-heavy quests (assuming you read everything and they're of decent size).
BTW, the example I linked wasn't my Dev's Choice arc; that one had over 600 plays by the end, and I received an absolutely insane amount of comments about it (almost completely positive). Which just goes to highlight the imbalance caused by simply having a story on the frontpage -- it was good, but it wasn't THAT much better than my other stories (or the stories of many other authors who never got a Dev's Choice), but based on many of the comments I've received, it was the best COH story in the universe!
I also hope that the entire Foundry focus in NW means that players will be somewhat more interested in it than they were in the COH MA (after "teh shiny" wore off, that is). But as I said before, this is a double-edged sword -- if people are only playing NW for the Foundry (and if many problems are addressed with "Foundry will fix it!", this is actually quite possible) and it turns out to be an unfun experience for them, they'll stop playing... and paying.
kotliMember, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Hero Users, Neverwinter Guardian Users, Neverwinter Knight of the Feywild UsersPosts: 577
edited March 2013
TBH what needed is a few tags for each creation which there already seem to be some but I recommend adding stuff that will let the player base find one that they want to play IE short medium long play time, story based content: light, medium, heavy etc the more info tags added the better IMO. <- this way someone who wants minimal story stuff can avoid it and us who want it can find it.
Iit would also mean one lot of content wont get reviews like this to short not enough story from reviewer 1, Just right in length and story from reviewer 2 and to long and to much story from reviewer 3. Instead Reviewer 1 & 3 will be playing other creations that suit there tastes leaving reviewer group 2 to play it and score it for themselves.
It will mean that a lot of the lame 'to long to short 1 star reviews should be removed' letting the creation find its true value.
Oh an extra note to PW: it should when you replay a creation reload your old review including text if possible (at a minimum it should display your star ratings) so you can change it as needed, and you need to beable to see old mission reviews for the 2nd part the overall campaign rating, for the larger ones.
What I would really like is an author blog page which gets shown in game. I can then post FAQs on it for most of the "It does not works" "Its impossible to complete" comments which would tell them it is a puzzle and they are supposed to read things.
Such a feature will be helpful for authors and players both and will be conducive to authors making quests with a lot of puzzles.
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lanessar13Member, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Guardian Users, SilverstarsPosts: 8Arc User
edited March 2013
Another category should be based on tips. Regardless of "ratings" etc. you can easily see if a quest is "good" when people are willing to pay out AD to the author. I don't think this should be the definitive factor in any sort of "rating" system, but showing "highly tipped" quests in another category could be telling (no amounts, mind you). This could be a "medal" rating system - Bronze star, silver star, gold star, platinum star.
I'd like to see that, personally.
Limited publication would also have the added benefit for testing, feedback, etc. Imagine if a Foundry author gets together a like-minded guild of people and allows them to play through the quest, get feedback, and then broadly publish the adventure when it's gone through the initial QA steps, with a group of friends? That would be incredible, because no single author can imagine the ways it might be broken, or see the flaws in his "logic" on a quest path. I've played a couple of Foundry adventures which were quite good, but I didn't figure out how to achieve one of the objectives. A little clearer wording on the part of the author probably would have netted 4 stars instead of 3. That's why we have play-testing - think in ways you cannot as a content author.
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Hehehe, well as a software engineer myself, I can state with authority, that some of us are idiots too.
My understanding is there is a way to "subscribe" to certain authors forthcoming and a simple way to find the content from those authors you enjoy. That's amazing if this rumor is true.
I think the Foundry could probably use work, that I am sure it has bugs and issues. We may need to live with the fact that it isn't quite "idiot proof" at launch. I think that's okay. I think this tool can only grow and improve, providing Cryptic keeps development staff on the project to improve it. I would argue it should be their highest priority, because it is the most unique and avant-garde part of this game. If it starts to really shine, I believe it will pay huge dividends financially for them.
But we also need to be patient as players. The tool will have warts. It has warts now (so I believe). If we can live with the fact it's not the "perfect' tool yet and make it very clear to Cryptic we'd like resources on the tool to improve it (and we'll pay to support the game in the process), we'll have something very, very special on our hands.
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supersizemeatMember, Neverwinter Beta UsersPosts: 0Arc User
edited March 2013
Hmm.
Actually, I'd like a system where you could see reviews in game. Ideally reviewers should be able to have their own ingame page, where they can more or less link you to pages they deem worthy of your time.
In essence, it's like the dev-pick, but free-for-all. I think Amazon has something like that, or GOG.com. When you play an adventure, you get to see who has it in their collection. Then you can visit those collections and check out what other adventures they liked.
Sort of the only answer to a massive amount of modules, is a massive amount of reviewers. And that can only be the community. Empower the reviewers - ideally everyone can find a few that they trust, some look for farm modules, some look for drizzt modules, and some likely will look for modules without drizzt
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lanessar13Member, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Guardian Users, SilverstarsPosts: 8Arc User
My understanding is there is a way to "subscribe" to certain authors forthcoming and a simple way to find the content from those authors you enjoy. That's amazing if this rumor is true.
Very true. In fact, I subscribed last BWE to Chili after playing Dungeon of Dread. So, no rumor there.
Lanessar13 made a recommendation to have quests rated by tips (I.e. how much AD that player received). I originally thought about recommending this as well but thought about how easy it would be to exploit. Have your friend send you 725000 AD and you send him the amount back on his. Both of you get really high ratings.
Not to mention, you will see all of the gold farmer's foundry content as number 1. Since you can't trade AD to my knowledge except by converting to Zen, the donation system is a tithe free transfer system. Make a shill foundry content and have your gold farmers donate their collected AD.
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Athkatla Arranaur, eat your heart out you gelatinous giant rat!
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turokhammerstoneMember, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Guardian Users, SilverstarsPosts: 0Arc User
edited March 2013
In game the foundry may not be able to address all of the categorization types for a particular quest. The answer is different depending on who the subject is. The Author can describe his/her quest with words as well as complete a self assessment survey. The player needs a better system than what we currently have.
Author Author: Arthur the Author Title: Evil Lich 1 The Beginning Version / Last Update: 1.06 <date> Type: Private or Public (Is it intended for guildies or real life friends or is it open to the realm) Background / Plot: Evil Lich wants to take over the realm. Your quest is to discover how she plans on doing it and then stopping her. Setting: Quest __, Campaign _XX_ Notes: This is a campaign setting that will lead the adventurer on a series of quest that will tell a tale of deceit, destruction, and death. The campaign is unfinished at this time. I have only completed 4 quests(adventures, stories, settings). [OR] I feel it is only about 30% through the campaign. [OR] I plan on having 10 total quest for this campaign. [OR] The story is unwritten. It is open ended and the feedback from the comments will dictate which way I go. It will be player driven. Style: Combat [60%], Story [40%], Role Playing [0%], Puzzle [0%] Discovery: Gold Trail [80%], PC Scouting [20%] Length: Short (5-10 Min) __, Medium (10-20 Min) __, Medium+ (20-30) __, Long (30+ Min) __
Player Player: Uber Pwns Rating: 1 - 10 Stars Review: Blah blah blah. Loved it! Hated it. Quit in the middle of it. Can't wait for more. Fully immersed... Style: Combat [40%], Story [40%], Role Playing [0%], Puzzle [20%] Review: Good mix of combat with text. Was lost a little at one part not understanding the puzzle portion. Discovery: Gold Trail [70%], PC Scouting [30%] Review: Not clear enough what I was supposed to do when the trail disappeared. Length: Short (5-10 Min) __, Medium (10-20 Min) __, Medium+ (20-30) __, Long (30+ Min) __ Review: 20 minutes but felt like an hour. 30 minutes but went by really fast Difficulty: 1 - 10 Stars Review: Had a hard time. Too many mobs during <font color="orange">HAMSTER</font> fight. The rest was OK. Too many magic users. Couldn't never get close to kill them. Too hard. I jumped on a rock and just ranged them to death. When they got close I blasted them away. Rinse and repeat. Too easy. Very challenging for a group of three. Started off easy fights then got hard at the end. Needed tactics. Bad trap locations Race: Dwarf Class: Devoted Cleric Solo: Yes / No Group: Yes Group #:3 Group Classes: Mage, Cleric, Rogue Finished the Quest: Yes / No Quit Quest: Yes / No Couldn't finish because of bugs: Yes / No Couldn't finish didn't know what needed to be done: Yes / No Bugs: Broken blah blah Story: Spelling was bad. Too much info. Lacked content. Hard to follow, to many gaps. Combat: See above. Orcs riding worgs on a ship. Doesn't make sense. Change the enemy. Puzzle: No puzzles. It was just confusing. No clues. Clever. Once I discovered the pattern it was easy. Very cool. Scenery: Great path for ambush. Need more trees and shrubbery. Need more uneven ground. Change lighting Music: Doesn't fit the scene. Chirping birds in a dungeon? Follow Author:XX Subscribed to Author: XX Recommend Author: XX Will continue quest line: XX
This is just a sample of what could be collected on a separate site like a wiki or fan site. All of the yes-no's could be searchable as well as the percentages. Will all players go to this level of detail. No, most won't. But I can see the value in this for those that are trying to get their content out there. Feed back (good and bad) is very helpful. We go back to the original problem. Can't get feed back when no one knows your content.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
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zaphtasticMember, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Guardian Users, SilverstarsPosts: 0Arc User
edited March 2013
Om nom nom, more stuff. Just a note -- after we get a Foundry forum, I will consolidate all of the suggestions from this thread into a new thread, and try to group similar suggestions together. I hope it'll help spark discussion on the finer points of this stuff (and also create a discussion entirely in the solution domain, instead of the weird problem domain - solution domain discussion I originally posted).
TBH what needed is a few tags for each creation which there already seem to be some but I recommend adding stuff that will let the player base find one that they want to play IE short medium long play time, story based content: light, medium, heavy etc the more info tags added the better IMO. <- this way someone who wants minimal story stuff can avoid it and us who want it can find it.
(...)
Oh an extra note to PW: it should when you replay a creation reload your old review including text if possible (at a minimum it should display your star ratings) so you can change it as needed, and you need to beable to see old mission reviews for the 2nd part the overall campaign rating, for the larger ones.
Yep, that's the main purpose of the tags suggestion. As for replaying, I thought this was the functionality already (it was in COH; if you replayed an arc, you'd see the stars you originally gave the arc on the rating screen in the end), and if not, it should be.
What I would really like is an author blog page which gets shown in game. I can then post FAQs on it for most of the "It does not works" "Its impossible to complete" comments which would tell them it is a puzzle and they are supposed to read things.
Such a feature will be helpful for authors and players both and will be conducive to authors making quests with a lot of puzzles.
I thought there was such a function? At least the GDC talk mentioned this (they also mentioned the subscription thing). For me as a player this is fairly helpful by itself, since one of my acid tests in COH was to see how well-written the description text was for the arc in question (I'm shallow, what can I say). Having an entire blog tells you significantly more about the author even if you don't go into specifics: is it used? is it updated? what's the quality of the writing? what kind of attitude does the author display on the blog? etc etc.
Another category should be based on tips. Regardless of "ratings" etc. you can easily see if a quest is "good" when people are willing to pay out AD to the author. I don't think this should be the definitive factor in any sort of "rating" system, but showing "highly tipped" quests in another category could be telling (no amounts, mind you). This could be a "medal" rating system - Bronze star, silver star, gold star, platinum star.
Silvernine84 beat me to it, but unfortunately I see this system as very exploitable... especially since the tips aren't taken out of the system, so they can be just given back. You could build a system that has anomaly detection features to detect back-and-forth tips, but who's to say a particular back-and-forth instance was not legitimate (not to mention there are many other ways to trade AD)? There are going to be many authors who are basically willing to cheat in order to get to the front page... and I personally wouldn't want to play their stories. There are many other ways this could be abused, e.g. spamming in general chat to run the quest and tip 25 AD (or whatever the max tip is), you'll give them 50 AD back. Etc.
I do support the amount of tips being displayed, just not using them as a sort mechanism.
Limited publication would also have the added benefit for testing, feedback, etc. Imagine if a Foundry author gets together a like-minded guild of people and allows them to play through the quest, get feedback, and then broadly publish the adventure when it's gone through the initial QA steps, with a group of friends? That would be incredible, because no single author can imagine the ways it might be broken, or see the flaws in his "logic" on a quest path. I've played a couple of Foundry adventures which were quite good, but I didn't figure out how to achieve one of the objectives. A little clearer wording on the part of the author probably would have netted 4 stars instead of 3. That's why we have play-testing - think in ways you cannot as a content author.
Yes, testing is essential. In COH we had the "quest status" flag for this (set by the author). It could be one of the following:
Work in Progress: the arc is currently being written. Insert 1996-era animated gifs of "men at work"/"under construction" signs here. At this point it's not intended for player consumption, save maybe a small group of friends asked by the author to run through it for an early story / gameplay iteration.
Looking for Feedback: the arc is in a v1.0 state, but the author wants feedback to improve and finalize it. This is where reviews take place.
Final: the arc is more-or-less set in stone, the author may make minor changes and bugfixes. You needed to have an arc in the 'final' state to be eligible for the (very few) contests.
The problem here was that most arcs languished in "Looking for feedback" forever, because nobody would play and review them! To go around this, some authors (the MA forum community, which was probably a really tiny slice of the entire author-base) went to various review outlets on forums, 3rd-party sites, etc. to advertise their arc for review. Yeah, you had to do heavy marketing even to get your arc reviewed.
My question is -- is there a way to do this within the Foundry that scales to the extremely high number of newly-created content? I'm of a mind it may be necessary to just leave this to the authors: let them seek out reviewers, look in the Foundry community for assistance, ask friends to play the content to be reviewed, etc. Once they set the content as final, THEN the various mechanisms can kick in to get them the exposure they need.
"Software engineers and the universe are in a race. Engineers to build idiot-proof software, and the universe to build a better idiot. So far, the universe is winning."
Heh. I'm a software engineer myself, though as an IT security analyst, I focus much more on breaking stuff... and I'll assure you, there is plenty of idiocy among developers as well. Not complaining, it's what gets me my paycheck! (buffer overflows in C code... in 2013? Why, thank you, sir.)
Also, believe it or not, but I'm currently designing a semi-automated QC / endorsement system for community-provided content in an FP7 research project (though admittedly this is is a relatively minor part of the project, and not the focus). Who said gaming and reality can't intersect?!
Actually, I'd like a system where you could see reviews in game. Ideally reviewers should be able to have their own ingame page, where they can more or less link you to pages they deem worthy of your time.
In essence, it's like the dev-pick, but free-for-all. I think Amazon has something like that, or GOG.com. When you play an adventure, you get to see who has it in their collection. Then you can visit those collections and check out what other adventures they liked.
Sort of the only answer to a massive amount of modules, is a massive amount of reviewers. And that can only be the community. Empower the reviewers - ideally everyone can find a few that they trust, some look for farm modules, some look for drizzt modules, and some likely will look for modules without drizzt
I fully agree with your sentiment: the system needs to build on what the players think of the content -- and not just how many stars something received. The players are the only variable in this equation that actually scales with the amount of content, so empower them! The trick is, of course, to ensure that the input from players itself is valuable.
As for the suggestion: I like it. It could be an extension of the 'favorites list' idea -- pick a few reviewers you trust, and their ratings pop up when you search, or heck, you can just play through the stories they recommend in the first place! I don't think there is a need to have a separate "reviewer" flag for this, though... let every single player be a potential reviewer, and other players can spot a particularly in-depth and high-quality comment on a quest, click the author's name, and find out a list of ratings/comments they have done. You could select to follow them as a reviewer (they may also be an author, so you'd need separate functionality for this) and enjoy the fruits of their labor, while they'd get warm fuzzies from you following them. I'd even go as far as to provide tip functionality for reviewers as well as authors (probably less AD, maybe 5-10)!
In game the foundry may not be able to address all of the categorization types for a particular quest. The answer is different depending on who the subject is. The Author can describe his/her quest with words as well as complete a self assessment survey. The player needs a better system than what we currently have.
It's definitely a good idea to give players more freedom / options in rating and reviewing stories. It's really important to strike a good balance -- most players won't want to fill out every field, and griefers may be able to fill out rarely-filled fields with "completely terrible, won't ever play again" style comments, and then those comments will be the only ones shown (because nobody else filled that field out).
Ideally I'd see something a bit more streamlined. If we're going with stars, we could have star ratings for many aspects of the quest as suggested by selenti earlier, and a single text box to serve as the review itself... this would probably maximize the number of people willing to go through it (5 clicks and some text vs. 1 click and some text). Of course in out-of-game systems (such as wikis, review databases, etc) these surveys should be much more detailed.
Yeah, they mention limiting Foundry playtime to 4 hours a day in the GDC talk "to limit exploiting". You can play after you hit the limit, but won't get any rewards. Realistically, most people play less than 4 hours a day on average -- but if someone is on a reviewing binge, that pretty much limits you to ~3-4 story-heavy quests (assuming you read everything and they're of decent size).
BTW, the example I linked wasn't my Dev's Choice arc; that one had over 600 plays by the end, and I received an absolutely insane amount of comments about it (almost completely positive). Which just goes to highlight the imbalance caused by simply having a story on the frontpage -- it was good, but it wasn't THAT much better than my other stories (or the stories of many other authors who never got a Dev's Choice), but based on many of the comments I've received, it was the best COH story in the universe!
I also hope that the entire Foundry focus in NW means that players will be somewhat more interested in it than they were in the COH MA (after "teh shiny" wore off, that is). But as I said before, this is a double-edged sword -- if people are only playing NW for the Foundry (and if many problems are addressed with "Foundry will fix it!", this is actually quite possible) and it turns out to be an unfun experience for them, they'll stop playing... and paying.
I've been playing MMOs for way too long, so my experience suggests the opposite problem: people play MMOs to progress their characters, first and foremost. Even people who are super into the roleplaying element have, from what I've seen, adopted the same efficiency approach as the average player. So any system like this that is designed to be basically the least efficient way to progress your character, is going to struggle. The only thing I see benefitting it in any solid way is that GO DO SOME FOUNDRY QUESTS thing that pops up on the left side of your minimap as an event, but as far as I know that's only a few coins as a reward, so best case scenario it's something people only do when that event pops up, for a little gold, the equivelant of doing some boring daily on World of Warcraft.
I'm _really_ trying to not be horrifically cynical about this, since I really enjoy this sort of thing as a content creator and wish more games went this route. But ****, it's like they're setting it up to be irrelevant.
As a sidenote, from where I'm sitting, 600-700 plays for a top-rated piece of content is amazingly terrible when you're talking about massively multiplayer games with hundreds of thousands if not millions of concurrent players at exciting, peak times. Again, reinforcing my sense that this is a really tiny percentage of the playerbase who even plays these things, let alone reviews them. I'd edit my earlier estimation of 1% to some percentage OF 1%.
During one of the tests which I cant talk about, I had a lot of fun in which I created a character named "Servant Girl" and basically went out at public areas weeping and crying people to help me. I was doing it to get people to play my foundry quest, role-playing as a servant girl who was sent out by Maeve and trying to get some help for the mistress of the house.
I found many people who were intrigued by the idea and attempted to play my quest - well, not first day - on first day I got zero.
I joined them in party - me being low level so I would run away and hide at first sign of danger(lvl 30 vs lvl 3, no thank you!). however I would warn the players of traps as being a servant there the girl did know about the traps.
That was very fun session for me. In the end someone (can't name) gave me a lot of gold and then said "You are not servant anymore. You are free!"
Sessions and possibilities like that made me consider that maybe reviews and ratings are not everything. Even if I made a quest, I can have fun by going out and meeting stranger adventurers!
Such possibilities give me a lot of hope for the foundry. There must exist many many unconventional means of rating and promoting your content which we have not yet considered.
p.s. for those who know what I am talking about - hehehehe! that was me!
zaphtasticMember, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Guardian Users, SilverstarsPosts: 0Arc User
edited March 2013
Well, as you can see from the shiny tag under my name, I got in the Foundry Beta earlier this week... which opens a few new possibilities.
Rest assured, one of my priorities is to get some improvement in this area, starting with the consolidation of suggestions / ideas in this thread, and presenting them in a way to make sure they reach the right ear. Of course if anyone has further suggestions, I'm very eager to hear them!
Well, as you can see from the shiny tag under my name, I got in the Foundry Beta earlier this week... which opens a few new possibilities.
Rest assured, one of my priorities is to get some improvement in this area, starting with the consolidation of suggestions / ideas in this thread, and presenting them in a way to make sure they reach the right ear. Of course if anyone has further suggestions, I'm very eager to hear them!
A small list of ideas that I liked in this thread and ideas of my own that I believe would help alleviate the problem:
-A daily bonus for running foundry missions below a certain # of runs/reviews. This could give unnoticed and new authors a chance ^^;.
-A daily, randomly selected (by the system) 5-star, 4-star, 3-star, 2-star and 1-star foundry mission. Each of them would have a different reward/bonus, randomly selected by the system from a list. This way the players won't automatically click on the 5-star mission.
-The implementation of the tag system.
-A recommendation system based on tags and general ratings.
-The creation of themed communities/groups, to which authors may submit their stories; communities that fans can join/subscribe to in-game, with their own foundry page-profile.
^Fanfiction.net is a great example of this, it encourages people with similar tastes to form communities on its site. Authors and readers can review each other's work and chat on a very basic bulletin board; promoting the fictions that have been accepted into the community's list but that have a low number of views.
It's a quite flexible system in my opinion, as it allows the users to set their own standards.
((The way I see it, communities have a lot of potential; authors would be able to work together and specifically craft stories that are complementary to each other's -and create a bigger sort of campaign.))
-Being able to see your friends and guildmates' favourite missions.
Comments
Getting good content to players in the Foundry - challenges and solutions
Handle: @zaphtastic
---- If I understand correctly, you are saying that it's the community's job to come up with solutions. I definitely agree with that -- while the active forum and 3rd-party site communities may be insignificantly tiny compared to the playerbase as a whole, we have the power to improve the system either by highlighting the biggest problems to the developers and suggesting solutions (such as this thread), and coming up with author workarounds for unaddressed problems whenever possible.
Even in a worst-case scenario (COH), the community can do its part to make the system more usable: make recommendation lists, host contests, 5-star story-heavy quests to counteract griefing, create and maintain review sites, etc. It is just that these activities unfortunately have a limited effect on the general playerbase (however, they are VERY useful for authors).
---- My main issue with the rating system is that it really does need a lot of people to play ALL content in the Foundry for ratings to become effective. It IS a good system if - like gillrmn said - you can guarantee that every single quest gets played by a good number of people (say, 500+). To reach THAT, you need ways to somewhat equalize exposure between the proven high-end stories and the unknown ones, while realizing that most players will want to play it safe and don't want to risk spending an hour of their life playing something that has a high probability of being bad. I'd also add a suggestion to lightly incentivize players to actually vote - maybe give them a small amount of copper/silver if they select a rating and write a comment after they've finished a quest for the first time? This could also be used to get them to participate in more elaborate rating schemes like the 'tag rating' one.
Getting downrated due to engine bugs is infuriating. I had my own work one-starred a few times in COH (and that storyarc could never break out of the 4-star hell because of those 1-stars) because of an elusive bug in one of the maps causing a boss to rarely (about 1 time out of 10) spawn in an unreachable location. The bug may have been fixed in a later patch, but by then it was too late.
Ultimately, I think players need to be aware that bug-free operation is not always in the control of the author and not downrate content because of perceived bugginess. Having a more nuanced voting system (such as the "vote for each tag" system proposed earlier in this thread) would definitely help with this... the player could vote 1 for the technical "tag", and 5 for story. Or there may even be a drop-down box (or similar UI element) on the voting screen with values such as:
- I did not complete the quest because it was not enjoyable (if the player cancelled the quest early)
- I did not complete the quest due to a bug (see above)
- I completed the quest (this would be set if the player completed the quest, and the drop-down would be greyed out)
which would also be shown next to ratings.Another idea is that you could choose to 'report a bug' instead of rating the quest, which would cause your comment to be highlighted in a different color on the quest's info screen to warn possible future players that there may be a bug in the quest that blocks progress. Of course this would open avenues to griefing, you'd need to figure out how such bug reports could be removed (maybe if X people successfully complete a playthrough?), etc etc.
Getting good content to players in the Foundry - challenges and solutions
Handle: @zaphtastic
Music to my ears and this inevitably is what a lot of us do.
For many reasons, for one it can actually narrow your focus and produce more entertainment, because you can cater the adventure to a known group of players, even sometimes referencing things you know they did in the past. It feels personalized, special and much more like a tabletop session that way.
Secondly, it allows you to move new modules in while taking old modules out, the slots you have to publish are usually limited, so keeping things up for a long time in hopes they "catch on" gets in the way of providing content to your guild and friends.
Finally, promoting your content to become top rated is a real chore. It involves a lot schilling and begging for people to play. It can really distract from the enjoyment of the game.
As for whether "cream rises to the top", well you see, that's precisely the point. This IS a way to ensure the cream rises to the top, if you define "top" as "finding adventures I want to play and making adventures I like to make". If you simply mean, "how do you make sure the best modules are the also the most popular", you can't do it.
You can't do it, because in order to become popular, you have to work hard at being popular, which can often mean, your quality is diluted a little in order to achieve it. Again, think of how some of the best literature ever written was panned. The Great Gatsby was a bust when it was published. Now I don't liken a D&D module to Fitzgerald, but a best seller, must be molded as a best seller from the start, no matter what medium your dealing in (film, novel, or music).
I don't think those who want their modules to become "top modules" will be disappointed. In time, if you are dedicated to that notion, you'll learn what "sells" a module, you'll learn how to promote your product, you'll forge the relationships necessary to get your work noticed. Which is all important work, because good popular modules make the game better and richer. So we are thankful for the authors who promote their work tirelessly.
However, what I am more concerned about is finding what *I* like. And I think many of us have the same concern. I don't look at the problem from the producer's standpoint. A producer who wants to get noticed, will get noticed. I worry more about finding that one petunia in the onion patch, with the petunia meaning an adventure that matches my taste, rather than what the rest of the community considers "great".
That's not to be elitist either, my taste is very suspect believe me. I like the rock band KISS, so any question of taste from me is immediately disqualified.
Which is why, I again, hope there's eventually a system to "like" certain authors (or follow them like twitter), and I hope there's specific comma delimited search tags we can attach to modules. Certain key words, much like hashtags, could really help filter out adventures that you know belong to a campaign or story or theme.
The more you can personalize the experience the better, to me, that's the REAL strength of UGC, it's the fact it produces so much content, you can eventually cater it all to your precise taste.
My humble wooden nickel on the subject.
Check out SHADOW on YouTube!
Definitely agree that there needs to be a way to search for "new" content, "specific" content(RP, Lore, Survival, Heavy Story, Fetch)
Would like to see some sort of "Up-n-Coming" or "One to Watch" or "Rising Star" tag for author or content.(as suggested in this thread)
A specific filter that shows "kin content" or content by people on your "friends list" would also help a lot. Especially for RPers.
Otherwise keep up the good work all.
"There are two things that drive technology forward in a huge leap in this world, one is war and one is business..."-- Timothy Wade 2012
"If you wish to join a guild, that will be running a guild foundry RP campaign then come take a look at [BLOOD]"
The way to resolve this is by having different search categories and changing the rating structure. Rather than averaging the star ratings of all users, add them together. So if a quest had 20 users rate it a five, that quest would have 100 points. Let us sort by the number of points. You could also allow negative ratings; the scoring range would be from -5 to +5 so that as time goes on, the score can reflect any changing opinions.
Have different search categories:
New quests (30 days or less) with most points per day
New quests (30 days or less) with most points
Quests with most points
Quests wirh most points per day
Quests with highest donations
Quests that my friends rated highest
I would prefer a toggle option to change the timeframe I am looking for. For example, I can hit 30 days for quests in the last month or 60 days or 15 days or 90 days, etc.
Seer of Seers, Sage of Sages, Prognosticator of Prognosticators,
The Boss of the Applesauce, Dwarven Cleric Extraordinaire...
Athkatla Arranaur, eat your heart out you gelatinous giant rat!
For example, I'd love to know if I will be able to..
- script a boss mob attack sequence, saving certain attacks until a specific situation.
- spawn in-fight events based on whether players accomplish something (like requiring the group to throw a switch when the boss is 50% health to avoid a flood of adds)
- randomize the location of certain hidden items when the zone is instantiated
- have conversation choices in an early discussion affect the conversation options later in the mission (if you're hostile towards a gnoll sentry, the cave of gnolls won't let you enter their lair near the end)
- implement traps in a true D&D fashion.. some wound, some sleep, and some kill.
- cast illusion spells on characters than change their appearance, and change how mobs interact with them
- have NPCs that can be added to the group, at least as followers, and then have some later event or fight cause them to switch to hostile or leave.
These are the first few requirements I hit when planning out a PnP module conversion, and so far I haven't discovered a resource where these sorts of questions are answered. If anyone has any links to reading material, I'd appreciate it.
But tagging is a good start, and will help me to find quests I would like to consume as well. But I want heaps of tags, not just 5 to 10 topics. But maby 50. (featuring what culture: drow, mix, dwarves ets, hidden areas?, story presented through text or MrBean style?) etc
I would like to echo this as well, this would benefit the authors that had their quest rated low due to client issues should not be penalized for this. It would put everyone on an even playing field and would have the same chances of rating high as the next author.
This Is a fantastic thread and I hope it continues to spawn new or at least reinforce the need for a better system.
Website Dedicated to Foundry Tutorials: www.NWUGC.com Twitter: @NWUGC
Gold or Bones!!
One pet peeve of mine is to get into a quest that gave the wrong suggested lvl and never mentions you'll be slaughtered and stuck in the quest if you don't party for it. Just throwing that out there!
FOR THE SEVEN!!!
Yes, marketing was always a problem in COH. You were expected to shill for your creations everywhere (forums, chat channels, zone chat, even party chat while grouping) because otherwise they would simply not get played ever. And still, in the later years, even that did little more than nothing unless you were already well-known. As an example, my last story arc was published in October of 2011 (its ID was around 525000, to give an idea of the amount of content it was 'competing with'). I marketed it in the following ways:
- Friends and guildies (duh)
- Posted on the forums under its own thread
- Posted on the forums in the "announce your story arc" thread
- Posted on the forums in my primary server (Virtue, one of the largest COH server)'s sticky "MA missions by Virtue players" thread
- Submitted it for review in 2 different places (that was about 50% of the entire review community back then, btw)
- Participated with it in the "Arc Club", a community for authors where we played and discussed each other's arcs every month
The reviews, the arc club, and my friends + guildies got me 15 plays altogether. I got 3 plays that were unaccounted for, and I'm fairly sure they only found the arc because they played my permanent page-1 Dev's Choice arc (which received new plays very regularly still) and clicked on my name to find more stuff by me... I'm pretty sure I would've stalled out at 15 (ie. the people I explicitly asked to play the arc) if I was a 'normal' author.The arc had a 5-star rating throughout its entire life, btw... in fact, I'm fairly sure it was at a 5.0 average for a looong while. Exactly! Everyone has different tastes and intentions for UGC; the role of the entire interface should be to help match players' needs with the authors' offerings.
---- That is one of the problems, yes -- such systems only work when everything has a large number of ratings. Ironically, the specific problem you mentioned would actually help very slightly here, since it'd put new content with a 5.0 average above older content.. at least until it got a single 4- or 3-star, at which point it'd disappear again. Yeah, a variation of the 'like' or 'upvote' system (e.g. stack overflow) instead of star rating would work better in general. I'm just worried that it's too late in development to do changes to the rating system on such a basic level.
---- Pretty much, yeah. I imagine you'd need some auto-generated tags to go with the ones set by the author:
Something like the number / type of enemy groups and other types of objectives could be shown, so if someone doesn't like ambushes or escorts, they can avoid the specific quest... also, the info window could display other metadata like the presence of secret doors, whether any specific class skills are needed/useful, if there are any tough custom bosses, etcetera. This could be easily turned into tags that the user can search for. Ideally the search system would SAVE the user's tag preferences locally so s/he doesn't have to enter it every time. Heck, the system could even auto-generate tags like "combat-heavy" (at least x number of combats per map) and "lore-heavy" (at least y interactable items). As long as these tags would only be used for searching, there'd be no point in trying to exploit the system -- sure, you could fool it by creating 50 empty lore items and copy/pasting Lorem Ipsum in their descriptions, but all you'd accomplish is some story-seekers coming to play your quest, becoming disappointed, and downvoting it.
---- While this is an admirable initiative (especially since Foundry playtime is time-limited), unfortunately I don't think it can cope with the massive number of content that'll be coming out after launch. It's the nature of the (symmetrical UGC) beast.
I still think it's a great idea, though -- there'll be many authors without much Foundry experience (especially at launch for obvious reasons), and having a sort of vetting process for a segment of the author-base could really help in getting them up to speed and letting them unleash their true potential.
Getting good content to players in the Foundry - challenges and solutions
Handle: @zaphtastic
There's some really valuable info for those like me who want to start creating content.
I'd like to reinforce to Cryptic what was said about refining the filters more than the actual Foundry mechanics.
I'm sure it's comparatively easy, all things considered, to tweak them and enable users to find UGC that they'll enjoy regardless of what they define 'enjoyable' as.
Cheers, AV
Avatar credit: stuartmcghee
Throw all the factors together: Limited play-time, lesser loot than just doing normal missions, no parity with 5 mans, let alone raids, and I just see a glaring case of "Why would anyone bother?". Obviously it's problematic if the majority of good content isn't even findable by those who want to find it, but when you have a mission like yours that was apparently dev-chosen for years and only managed to hit 70 reviews, I get the feeling that the % of total players of the game actually interested in playing Foundry content is miniscule (less than 1% after the first few times, in other words).
BTW, the example I linked wasn't my Dev's Choice arc; that one had over 600 plays by the end, and I received an absolutely insane amount of comments about it (almost completely positive). Which just goes to highlight the imbalance caused by simply having a story on the frontpage -- it was good, but it wasn't THAT much better than my other stories (or the stories of many other authors who never got a Dev's Choice), but based on many of the comments I've received, it was the best COH story in the universe!
I also hope that the entire Foundry focus in NW means that players will be somewhat more interested in it than they were in the COH MA (after "teh shiny" wore off, that is). But as I said before, this is a double-edged sword -- if people are only playing NW for the Foundry (and if many problems are addressed with "Foundry will fix it!", this is actually quite possible) and it turns out to be an unfun experience for them, they'll stop playing... and paying.
Getting good content to players in the Foundry - challenges and solutions
Handle: @zaphtastic
Iit would also mean one lot of content wont get reviews like this to short not enough story from reviewer 1, Just right in length and story from reviewer 2 and to long and to much story from reviewer 3. Instead Reviewer 1 & 3 will be playing other creations that suit there tastes leaving reviewer group 2 to play it and score it for themselves.
It will mean that a lot of the lame 'to long to short 1 star reviews should be removed' letting the creation find its true value.
Oh an extra note to PW: it should when you replay a creation reload your old review including text if possible (at a minimum it should display your star ratings) so you can change it as needed, and you need to beable to see old mission reviews for the 2nd part the overall campaign rating, for the larger ones.
Such a feature will be helpful for authors and players both and will be conducive to authors making quests with a lot of puzzles.
I'd like to see that, personally.
Limited publication would also have the added benefit for testing, feedback, etc. Imagine if a Foundry author gets together a like-minded guild of people and allows them to play through the quest, get feedback, and then broadly publish the adventure when it's gone through the initial QA steps, with a group of friends? That would be incredible, because no single author can imagine the ways it might be broken, or see the flaws in his "logic" on a quest path. I've played a couple of Foundry adventures which were quite good, but I didn't figure out how to achieve one of the objectives. A little clearer wording on the part of the author probably would have netted 4 stars instead of 3. That's why we have play-testing - think in ways you cannot as a content author.
"Software engineers and the universe are in a race. Engineers to build idiot-proof software, and the universe to build a better idiot. So far, the universe is winning."
My understanding is there is a way to "subscribe" to certain authors forthcoming and a simple way to find the content from those authors you enjoy. That's amazing if this rumor is true.
I think the Foundry could probably use work, that I am sure it has bugs and issues. We may need to live with the fact that it isn't quite "idiot proof" at launch. I think that's okay. I think this tool can only grow and improve, providing Cryptic keeps development staff on the project to improve it. I would argue it should be their highest priority, because it is the most unique and avant-garde part of this game. If it starts to really shine, I believe it will pay huge dividends financially for them.
But we also need to be patient as players. The tool will have warts. It has warts now (so I believe). If we can live with the fact it's not the "perfect' tool yet and make it very clear to Cryptic we'd like resources on the tool to improve it (and we'll pay to support the game in the process), we'll have something very, very special on our hands.
Check out SHADOW on YouTube!
Actually, I'd like a system where you could see reviews in game. Ideally reviewers should be able to have their own ingame page, where they can more or less link you to pages they deem worthy of your time.
In essence, it's like the dev-pick, but free-for-all. I think Amazon has something like that, or GOG.com. When you play an adventure, you get to see who has it in their collection. Then you can visit those collections and check out what other adventures they liked.
Sort of the only answer to a massive amount of modules, is a massive amount of reviewers. And that can only be the community. Empower the reviewers - ideally everyone can find a few that they trust, some look for farm modules, some look for drizzt modules, and some likely will look for modules without drizzt
Very true. In fact, I subscribed last BWE to Chili after playing Dungeon of Dread. So, no rumor there.
Not to mention, you will see all of the gold farmer's foundry content as number 1. Since you can't trade AD to my knowledge except by converting to Zen, the donation system is a tithe free transfer system. Make a shill foundry content and have your gold farmers donate their collected AD.
Seer of Seers, Sage of Sages, Prognosticator of Prognosticators,
The Boss of the Applesauce, Dwarven Cleric Extraordinaire...
Athkatla Arranaur, eat your heart out you gelatinous giant rat!
Author
Author: Arthur the Author
Title: Evil Lich 1 The Beginning
Version / Last Update: 1.06 <date>
Type: Private or Public (Is it intended for guildies or real life friends or is it open to the realm)
Background / Plot: Evil Lich wants to take over the realm. Your quest is to discover how she plans on doing it and then stopping her.
Setting: Quest __, Campaign _XX_
Notes: This is a campaign setting that will lead the adventurer on a series of quest that will tell a tale of deceit, destruction, and death. The campaign is unfinished at this time. I have only completed 4 quests(adventures, stories, settings). [OR] I feel it is only about 30% through the campaign. [OR] I plan on having 10 total quest for this campaign. [OR] The story is unwritten. It is open ended and the feedback from the comments will dictate which way I go. It will be player driven.
Style: Combat [60%], Story [40%], Role Playing [0%], Puzzle [0%]
Discovery: Gold Trail [80%], PC Scouting [20%]
Length: Short (5-10 Min) __, Medium (10-20 Min) __, Medium+ (20-30) __, Long (30+ Min) __
Player
Player: Uber Pwns
Rating: 1 - 10 Stars
Review: Blah blah blah. Loved it! Hated it. Quit in the middle of it. Can't wait for more. Fully immersed...
Style: Combat [40%], Story [40%], Role Playing [0%], Puzzle [20%]
Review: Good mix of combat with text. Was lost a little at one part not understanding the puzzle portion.
Discovery: Gold Trail [70%], PC Scouting [30%]
Review: Not clear enough what I was supposed to do when the trail disappeared.
Length: Short (5-10 Min) __, Medium (10-20 Min) __, Medium+ (20-30) __, Long (30+ Min) __
Review: 20 minutes but felt like an hour. 30 minutes but went by really fast
Difficulty: 1 - 10 Stars
Review: Had a hard time. Too many mobs during <font color="orange">HAMSTER</font> fight. The rest was OK. Too many magic users. Couldn't never get close to kill them. Too hard. I jumped on a rock and just ranged them to death. When they got close I blasted them away. Rinse and repeat. Too easy. Very challenging for a group of three. Started off easy fights then got hard at the end. Needed tactics. Bad trap locations
Race: Dwarf
Class: Devoted Cleric
Solo: Yes / No
Group: Yes
Group #: 3
Group Classes: Mage, Cleric, Rogue
Finished the Quest: Yes / No
Quit Quest: Yes / No
Couldn't finish because of bugs: Yes / No
Couldn't finish didn't know what needed to be done: Yes / No
Bugs: Broken blah blah
Story: Spelling was bad. Too much info. Lacked content. Hard to follow, to many gaps.
Combat: See above. Orcs riding worgs on a ship. Doesn't make sense. Change the enemy.
Puzzle: No puzzles. It was just confusing. No clues. Clever. Once I discovered the pattern it was easy. Very cool.
Scenery: Great path for ambush. Need more trees and shrubbery. Need more uneven ground. Change lighting
Music: Doesn't fit the scene. Chirping birds in a dungeon?
Follow Author:XX
Subscribed to Author: XX
Recommend Author: XX
Will continue quest line: XX
This is just a sample of what could be collected on a separate site like a wiki or fan site. All of the yes-no's could be searchable as well as the percentages. Will all players go to this level of detail. No, most won't. But I can see the value in this for those that are trying to get their content out there. Feed back (good and bad) is very helpful. We go back to the original problem. Can't get feed back when no one knows your content.
---- Yep, that's the main purpose of the tags suggestion. As for replaying, I thought this was the functionality already (it was in COH; if you replayed an arc, you'd see the stars you originally gave the arc on the rating screen in the end), and if not, it should be.
---- I thought there was such a function? At least the GDC talk mentioned this (they also mentioned the subscription thing). For me as a player this is fairly helpful by itself, since one of my acid tests in COH was to see how well-written the description text was for the arc in question (I'm shallow, what can I say). Having an entire blog tells you significantly more about the author even if you don't go into specifics: is it used? is it updated? what's the quality of the writing? what kind of attitude does the author display on the blog? etc etc.
---- Silvernine84 beat me to it, but unfortunately I see this system as very exploitable... especially since the tips aren't taken out of the system, so they can be just given back. You could build a system that has anomaly detection features to detect back-and-forth tips, but who's to say a particular back-and-forth instance was not legitimate (not to mention there are many other ways to trade AD)? There are going to be many authors who are basically willing to cheat in order to get to the front page... and I personally wouldn't want to play their stories. There are many other ways this could be abused, e.g. spamming in general chat to run the quest and tip 25 AD (or whatever the max tip is), you'll give them 50 AD back. Etc.
I do support the amount of tips being displayed, just not using them as a sort mechanism. Yes, testing is essential. In COH we had the "quest status" flag for this (set by the author). It could be one of the following:
- Work in Progress: the arc is currently being written. Insert 1996-era animated gifs of "men at work"/"under construction" signs here. At this point it's not intended for player consumption, save maybe a small group of friends asked by the author to run through it for an early story / gameplay iteration.
- Looking for Feedback: the arc is in a v1.0 state, but the author wants feedback to improve and finalize it. This is where reviews take place.
- Final: the arc is more-or-less set in stone, the author may make minor changes and bugfixes. You needed to have an arc in the 'final' state to be eligible for the (very few) contests.
The problem here was that most arcs languished in "Looking for feedback" forever, because nobody would play and review them! To go around this, some authors (the MA forum community, which was probably a really tiny slice of the entire author-base) went to various review outlets on forums, 3rd-party sites, etc. to advertise their arc for review. Yeah, you had to do heavy marketing even to get your arc reviewed.My question is -- is there a way to do this within the Foundry that scales to the extremely high number of newly-created content? I'm of a mind it may be necessary to just leave this to the authors: let them seek out reviewers, look in the Foundry community for assistance, ask friends to play the content to be reviewed, etc. Once they set the content as final, THEN the various mechanisms can kick in to get them the exposure they need.
--- Heh. I'm a software engineer myself, though as an IT security analyst, I focus much more on breaking stuff... and I'll assure you, there is plenty of idiocy among developers as well. Not complaining, it's what gets me my paycheck! (buffer overflows in C code... in 2013? Why, thank you, sir.)
Also, believe it or not, but I'm currently designing a semi-automated QC / endorsement system for community-provided content in an FP7 research project (though admittedly this is is a relatively minor part of the project, and not the focus). Who said gaming and reality can't intersect?!
---- I fully agree with your sentiment: the system needs to build on what the players think of the content -- and not just how many stars something received. The players are the only variable in this equation that actually scales with the amount of content, so empower them! The trick is, of course, to ensure that the input from players itself is valuable.
As for the suggestion: I like it. It could be an extension of the 'favorites list' idea -- pick a few reviewers you trust, and their ratings pop up when you search, or heck, you can just play through the stories they recommend in the first place! I don't think there is a need to have a separate "reviewer" flag for this, though... let every single player be a potential reviewer, and other players can spot a particularly in-depth and high-quality comment on a quest, click the author's name, and find out a list of ratings/comments they have done. You could select to follow them as a reviewer (they may also be an author, so you'd need separate functionality for this) and enjoy the fruits of their labor, while they'd get warm fuzzies from you following them. I'd even go as far as to provide tip functionality for reviewers as well as authors (probably less AD, maybe 5-10)!
---- It's definitely a good idea to give players more freedom / options in rating and reviewing stories. It's really important to strike a good balance -- most players won't want to fill out every field, and griefers may be able to fill out rarely-filled fields with "completely terrible, won't ever play again" style comments, and then those comments will be the only ones shown (because nobody else filled that field out).
Ideally I'd see something a bit more streamlined. If we're going with stars, we could have star ratings for many aspects of the quest as suggested by selenti earlier, and a single text box to serve as the review itself... this would probably maximize the number of people willing to go through it (5 clicks and some text vs. 1 click and some text). Of course in out-of-game systems (such as wikis, review databases, etc) these surveys should be much more detailed.
Getting good content to players in the Foundry - challenges and solutions
Handle: @zaphtastic
I've been playing MMOs for way too long, so my experience suggests the opposite problem: people play MMOs to progress their characters, first and foremost. Even people who are super into the roleplaying element have, from what I've seen, adopted the same efficiency approach as the average player. So any system like this that is designed to be basically the least efficient way to progress your character, is going to struggle. The only thing I see benefitting it in any solid way is that GO DO SOME FOUNDRY QUESTS thing that pops up on the left side of your minimap as an event, but as far as I know that's only a few coins as a reward, so best case scenario it's something people only do when that event pops up, for a little gold, the equivelant of doing some boring daily on World of Warcraft.
I'm _really_ trying to not be horrifically cynical about this, since I really enjoy this sort of thing as a content creator and wish more games went this route. But ****, it's like they're setting it up to be irrelevant.
As a sidenote, from where I'm sitting, 600-700 plays for a top-rated piece of content is amazingly terrible when you're talking about massively multiplayer games with hundreds of thousands if not millions of concurrent players at exciting, peak times. Again, reinforcing my sense that this is a really tiny percentage of the playerbase who even plays these things, let alone reviews them. I'd edit my earlier estimation of 1% to some percentage OF 1%.
I found many people who were intrigued by the idea and attempted to play my quest - well, not first day - on first day I got zero.
I joined them in party - me being low level so I would run away and hide at first sign of danger(lvl 30 vs lvl 3, no thank you!). however I would warn the players of traps as being a servant there the girl did know about the traps.
That was very fun session for me. In the end someone (can't name) gave me a lot of gold and then said "You are not servant anymore. You are free!"
Sessions and possibilities like that made me consider that maybe reviews and ratings are not everything. Even if I made a quest, I can have fun by going out and meeting stranger adventurers!
Such possibilities give me a lot of hope for the foundry. There must exist many many unconventional means of rating and promoting your content which we have not yet considered.
p.s. for those who know what I am talking about - hehehehe! that was me!
Pure Win
..
Rest assured, one of my priorities is to get some improvement in this area, starting with the consolidation of suggestions / ideas in this thread, and presenting them in a way to make sure they reach the right ear. Of course if anyone has further suggestions, I'm very eager to hear them!
Getting good content to players in the Foundry - challenges and solutions
Handle: @zaphtastic
zaph may not like my suggestion, and so far I've seen a *lot* of challenges by some of the more active voices in the community on it, but I'm always looking for more input on the idea that the Foundry can be a marketplace - http://nw-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?143371-How-to-Succeed-in-(Foundry)-Advertising
- Zesban
What Class Are You?
-A daily bonus for running foundry missions below a certain # of runs/reviews. This could give unnoticed and new authors a chance ^^;.
-A daily, randomly selected (by the system) 5-star, 4-star, 3-star, 2-star and 1-star foundry mission. Each of them would have a different reward/bonus, randomly selected by the system from a list. This way the players won't automatically click on the 5-star mission.
-The implementation of the tag system.
-A recommendation system based on tags and general ratings.
-The creation of themed communities/groups, to which authors may submit their stories; communities that fans can join/subscribe to in-game, with their own foundry page-profile.
^Fanfiction.net is a great example of this, it encourages people with similar tastes to form communities on its site. Authors and readers can review each other's work and chat on a very basic bulletin board; promoting the fictions that have been accepted into the community's list but that have a low number of views.
It's a quite flexible system in my opinion, as it allows the users to set their own standards.
((The way I see it, communities have a lot of potential; authors would be able to work together and specifically craft stories that are complementary to each other's -and create a bigger sort of campaign.))
-Being able to see your friends and guildmates' favourite missions.