test content
Logo
What is the Arc Client?
Install Arc
Fix the "For Review" list, please.
raphaeldisanto
Member Posts: 402 Arc User
I have to say - Firstly, the "For Review" thing is a good idea in theory but a terrible idea in practice.
There will always be more content than can be reviewed, even with an army of volunteer reviewers, so that list will always be massively long, and the chances of your quest getting reviewed is minimal, unless we can search for quests that we want to review.
The 'For Review' list is long, unsorted and unmanageable. I can't sort by name, date, or author. I'm sure there's a very great reason why the search filters are enabled on every tab but that one....
I understand that you don't want a glut of "for testing" maps appearing on the real foundry list, but at the same time, real adventures are going to get lost in that same glut of "for testing" maps, just in the 'For Review' list.
There will always be more content than can be reviewed, even with an army of volunteer reviewers, so that list will always be massively long, and the chances of your quest getting reviewed is minimal, unless we can search for quests that we want to review.
The 'For Review' list is long, unsorted and unmanageable. I can't sort by name, date, or author. I'm sure there's a very great reason why the search filters are enabled on every tab but that one....
I understand that you don't want a glut of "for testing" maps appearing on the real foundry list, but at the same time, real adventures are going to get lost in that same glut of "for testing" maps, just in the 'For Review' list.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
Post edited by raphaeldisanto on
0
Comments
I tried finding my quest under the For Review section, and never could. I saw about 10 different Arena maps, 10 different Zombie Apocolypse Maps, and about 20 maps that are nothing but a small area with a giant mob of enemies. A lot of people are complaining that they put many hours into the storylines of their quests, typing page after page of dialogue, and customizing the look of the encounters/npc's, only to be outranked by a bunch of "easy mob" maps designed for farming.
Right, and this has given a bad first impression of the game to a lot of people upon first completing a quest and being unable to share it. Most of us are patient enough to wait a day or two for a fix, but I'm on my second day waiting, and at this point I've just quit playing or working on my second quest until I see this is going to be fixed.
On top of that anti quick-random-review-rating reward farming feature would be author's made question or two at the end of the story checking if reviewer actually paid attention to the story of the quest. If reviewer cant answer it correctly he may not rate the map (cause he is suspected of farming testing rewards).
This way we will have incentive for testing under review maps, yet it would be farming proof. And even if author would make some impossible to answer questions, he is punishing himself, cause his map will never get ratings.
Great idea.
The gist of the suggestion is to give some sort of reward to players for playing content without many plays (which includes playing the quests in the review queue). Realistically, most players will NOT waste many hours of their time playing 'unproven' content without any reward... just ask anyone who's ever tried playing Random Arc Roulette in COH. So you need incentivization. This can either be a minor reward (like a potion or ID scroll) or a major one on a timer (so you can only get x/week or y/day to prevent abuse). It could also be a Foundry-only reward, such as a healthstone that can only be used on Foundry missions, or a low % chance to get a rare mount/companion. Etc etc.
Even then, there's a very real possibility that there just aren't going to be enough reviewers for the content... which ultimately reveals the necessity of using some sort of classification criteria (such as tags) to make it all manageable. Ultimately, if the review queue idea doesn't work out, I see authors using friends/guildies (or rating their own quest through alt accounts) to get past the "needs review" hurdle.
Getting good content to players in the Foundry - challenges and solutions
Handle: @zaphtastic
If you propose rewardbig enough people WILL do what the reward require. Games development is all about leading people with the leesh of their fun and profits and in mmorpg profits translates to fun. And testing a map doesnt take as long as making it, so your "there will never be enough of testers" is simply false. They just need time-worthy reward for reviewing (note: not for farming - my suggestion in previous post shows how to exclude rewarding the farming insetad of reviewing).
I'm a player who wants to play foundry content (and get rewarded for it). Let's assume playing through a story quest takes half an hour, and playing through an xp farm quest takes 5 minutes. I have one hour of playtime for the Foundry.
So why would an average player play 4] instead of 3] (and why would an average player play 3] instead of 1])? You'd need incentives that surpass the reward for 1], which counteracts the entire point of the "qualified for daily rewards" system, and instead rewards authors churning out new quests and others playing them for an even bigger bonus.
Getting good content to players in the Foundry - challenges and solutions
Handle: @zaphtastic
It doesnt. Becouse you can review map wwhile it is under review only once. So yeah here is a recipe:
1. Make Astral Diamonds bonus reward for reviewing the map that is "under review". (and get a lot of volunteers)
2. Make the reward scale down when map takes less than 25 minutes. (drastic scaling, so it gives like 10% of reward for very short quests - removing them as the best candidates to acumulate most ratings - so people threat them all equally no matter the time)
3. Make each map be reviewable only once while within this "promotion" of unreviewed maps. (only 1 reward per 1 reviewed map)
4. Make the author set the question before review window to make sure the reviewer is not mindless farmer giving fake rating.
So as i said: If the reward is worthwhile, there will be people willing to do what it takes. And by clever secrutiy features you will disable the fake ratings or reward farming, mass produced quests.
My point was more around the fact that Cryptic doesn't seem to agree with heavy incentivization, sadly... in fact, they designed the entire "qualified" system to go against rewarding little-known (or unreviewed) content. They do have some solutions in mind, but we don't know specifics. Quoth RoBoBo from that thread (link):
Getting good content to players in the Foundry - challenges and solutions
Handle: @zaphtastic
"Quests" where there is no dialog or story and simply an XP Grind should not be allowed to be called Quests in the first place. They should definitely not be allowed to be rated more than 3 stars.
The review system needs an overhaul. I think once players reach the level of playing foundry quests there should be a random selection system and a "Review a Quest" objective set up with a random un-reviewed quest. That way every new player looks how to review quests.
I think the search function needs addressing badly also. If we the creators cannot find our own Quest what hope do we have of others finding it to be reviewed?
However, making it mandatory to have story/dialog/whatever will not deter farmers from making powerlevelling quests. They'll just cut and paste 'Lorem Ipsum' or 'aaaaaaa' into the dialog, and click through it.
In fact, everyone should read THIS post right now. This phenomenon (players using UGC to powerlevel their characters) is very much not new. Trying to fight it will very likely end in tears.
It's an interesting idea to have a 'review a random quest' button... though, as I said above, you'd need some really serious incentivization to get players to do this. Why waste an hour of my time playing something really bad, when I could be playing some top-shelf polished quests from the top 10 in the 'best' list?
Getting good content to players in the Foundry - challenges and solutions
Handle: @zaphtastic
e: and yes, bribing people to play content was a sad reality of COH, even if 'bribing' only meant 'asking them in person really nicely'. Despite my marketing efforts, I got a grand total of 0 plays from 'random people' (ones I didn't specifically ask to play it) over more than a month on one of my (IMO) best story arcs. Then it got Dev's Choiced (COH equivalent of featuring), I got 100+ plays overnight, and I woke up to a crazy number of comments to the effect of 'this was the best story I've ever played!!11'.
"And so it goes."
Getting good content to players in the Foundry - challenges and solutions
Handle: @zaphtastic
I cannot put enough stress in how vital a working search system is for the Foundry's health.
Currently, it is not possible to find a quest that is marked "for review" by searching by name or author.
Since manually scrolling through tens or hundreds of for-review quests in search of the one we want is neither quick nor easy, it will mean that people will often give up searching for any new missions they hear friends talking about, which will in time discourage authors from creating new content.
Could we please get a way to search in this category too, for the sake of new and future UGC?
[SIGPIC]Or am I?[/SIGPIC]
This loony is also known as @Derangement.
The review section needs a search function. It needs a peer review function like the regular section. That allows those higher rated to move up. It needs to not be a scroll option but split into pages. The scroll function bogs the game down trying to load all of them at once. You need a way to flag a your foundry quest as private for those that wish to test their content and remove them from the public for the time being.
a) don't care about the foundry or user-generated content
b) just want to hit max level as fast as possible and be "uber"
I'll be honest - my biggest frustration right now comes from my friends not being able to find (and test) an instance that I'm writing specifically for them.
I actually don't care about whether my quests are popular or not. I don't care whether they're featured or not. I don't make them for the wider population. I don't even care whether or not my quests get out of 'For Review', except that that'll make them easier for my friends to find.
In fact, if there was a way to subscribe to a foundry author -WITHOUT- needing to find one of their quests in the list, I probably wouldn't even have started this thread in the first place, all my friends would have been able to subscribe to me and find my quests easily.
Random Foundry Review
It gives you random unreviewed foundry quest and if you complete it and answer author's questions about its story, you can review it and then get bonus reward. However you can take the new random foundry quest only once every 30 minutes.
It would also have "report farm quest" and "report broken quest" buttons, and after acumulating enough of farm quest reports, its being sent to GM which can ban the map and the author from using Foundry for 2 months. And if it accumulated enough of "broken quest" its being withdrawed from the foundry and gives a message to the author in the foundry that his quest is reported as broken - and shows the message players left when using report broken quest function. Author may re-publish the quest after 3 days cooldown is over.
On top of that i would make the foundry the way that each author can publish only 1 map every 3 days and no under review map can be played more than twice on same account untill it goes public.
Another feature would be to make the random finder weight the maps with least reports more than the ones who got such reports. So players would more often play maps that are not suspicious of being broken or farm quests.
which is impossible @ 1 frame per second since scrolling goes quicker than the actual onscreen feedback meaning you will miss maps in the progress making the manual search impossible...
and dont give me the the whole your videocard might not be good nuff thing i have dual nvidia titans