Hall of Fame is not realistically attainable
By
Amberyl,
Posted on: 2009-04-09 21:10 in Mission Architect
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The differences between the votes you get when you're on the first page, and the votes you get when you drop to four stars and disappear to the back of the database are night and day. If you are on the first page you receive an inordinate amount of sub-3 votes; far, far more than you get when your arc dips to four stars and disappears in to the murky depths of the database. My arc bounces constantly from 4 stars to 5 stars and back again, and it's for precisely this reason.
Most of the people I talk to about this report exactly the same thing, and these include people with extremely good and serious arcs (mine is basically constant bathos and meta-humour garbage, and I can at least see why someone might vote it a 1 or 2 if it really rubbed them the wrong way, but arcs like @jjac's Tangle In Time do not deserve a single vote below 3, at all, ever, and the fact that his arc is now languishing on four stars because of the one-votes it received while on the first page is really tragic.)
I don't think the staying power of a Hall of Fame entry will be dictated by the virtue of the arc in question so much as the spitefulness of whoever happens to be browsing at any given moment, honestly. This is more a failing of the rating system as a whole, though, than with the Hall of Fame specifically. Hall of Fame simply increases visibility, and I suppose the point I'm making is that increased visibility can actually be quite the detriment to your rating, which is the real problem, and I presume is why people want Hall of Fame to be an immutable title.
I'd personally just like to have the fourth publishing slot without worrying I'm going to lose it again before I finish writing the arc.
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come to think of it. thats exactly what happened to my first arc. it was doing mostly good, had a 5 star rating..hit page 1 on day one of the MA on live..and then has languished at 4 star since about an hour after that.
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Arc ID 58363!
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You don't need to be above 4.5 to get HoF, you need to be above 4.0.
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The last official dev word on the subject was that it's 4.5+, and the evidence from the one wobbly HOF arc confirms that.
Global @Twoflower / MA Creator & Pro Indie Game Developer.
Mission Architect Works: DIY Laser Moonbase (Dev Choice!), An Internship in the Fine Art of Revenge (2009 MA Award Winner!) and many more! Plus Brand New Arcs for Issue 21!
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The flawed assumption being made is that the relative score will instead diverge from normality after reaching a certain point into approaching normality.
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Uh, guy? What do you think "random" means? It means there's no way you can predict what's going to happen. Working assumption is that 30% give random ratings and don't know about 0 stars so they rate a 3 average. This means your arc's at 4.4 if the remaining 70% all rate it 5. If you can get a temporary influx of "sane" people (through word of mouth or whatever) then your arc can crest above 4.5 but after that influx fades the randoms will drag it back down. Or you just get a small stretch of good random luck and you go above 4.5, but then as more people play you hit a bad stretch and drop back down.
I mean, you could make the argument that a hall of fame arc needs constant promotion if it wants to stay hall of fame. I don't think it's a good argument but you could make it. I will continue to say that the steady state of a "perfect" arc is going to be 4.4 or slightly south.
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I am making no argument, I am making an observation and comment on a flawed assumption.
Restated in terms of statistics, the flawed assumption being that as the sample size increase, the margin of error also increases.
Let's Dance!
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I liked Muu's earlier thought that it should, at the least, go into a "former HoF" status or something. That way, if the arc is actually terrible and it was just a giant voting block or something it doesn't keep the status unfairly, but it also gets recognized for having at least 1000 5 star votes at one point.
I imagine this would also solve the "You have access to a fourth arc, you don't" status.
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Hmm, I did't think about voting blocks. We don't want some badge-clubs token 1-mission 1 objective arc being HoF forever after the badgers have got it up there. So yeah, maybe HoF needs to maintain a certian rating (lower than it's intital attainment req, I aggree, is a good idea) to maintain it's HoF status. But the extra slot should definitely not be lost.
Eco.
MArcs:
The Echo, Arc ID 1688 (5mish, easy, drama)
The Audition, Arc ID 221240 (6 mish, complex mech, comedy)
Storming Citadel, Arc ID 379488 (lowbie, 1mish, 10-min timed)
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
[The Incarnate System is] Jack Emmert all over again, only this time it's not "1 hero = 3 white minions" it's "1 hero = 3 white rocks."
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HOF missions losing their status is ridiculous.
The bar is high enough that getting over it represents a major achievement and a guarantee of a certain level of quality- where's the logic in 'losing' them at some future date?
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
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We declare the popular vote legitimate enough to get it there, but then say it is no longer relevant if that same group votes it down?
I dunno I'm on the fence, but if we have "faith" in the voting system to work then you can't really pick and chose just because one outcome isn't desirable.
If the people vote you down then you should only have 3 spots just like everyone else. If the mission is strong enough it will achieve a solid HoF and maintain it indefinitely. Assuming we have "faith" in the voting system that is.
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I'd rather look at the extra slot as a one-time reward for acheiving hoF. You don't ask an Olympic Gold Medalist Sprinter to keep winning the event every week in order to keep his medal. If someone gets into the HoF, they should get an extra slot for doing that. if they drop out it doesn't reverse time and change their past success.
Eco.
MArcs:
The Echo, Arc ID 1688 (5mish, easy, drama)
The Audition, Arc ID 221240 (6 mish, complex mech, comedy)
Storming Citadel, Arc ID 379488 (lowbie, 1mish, 10-min timed)
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
[The Incarnate System is] Jack Emmert all over again, only this time it's not "1 hero = 3 white minions" it's "1 hero = 3 white rocks."
|
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I'd rather look at the extra slot as a one-time reward for acheiving hoF. You don't ask an Olympic Gold Medalist Sprinter to keep winning the event every week in order to keep his medal. If someone gets into the HoF, they should get an extra slot for doing that. if they drop out it doesn't reverse time and change their past success.
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I agree wholeheartedly. Also, once you hit HoF the average to stay at it should be 4 stars rather than 5.
WN
Check out one of my most recent arcs:
457506 - A Very Special Episode - An abandoned TV, a missing kid's TV show host and more
416951 - The Ms. Manners Task Force - More wacky villains, Wannabes. things in poor taste
or one of my other arcs including two 2010 Player's Choice Winners and an2009 Official AE Awards Nominee for Best Original Story
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But if DC/HOF are the only methods that will ever be provided, we're really not going to get the growth we need with MA. Quality authors bring quality content bring players to the game, which is good for COH's health in the long run. And I'm guessing that more than 2% of all authors are of a high enough caliber to produce lots of solid stuff.
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There is no basis for this statement, or against it. You can't know if 2% or more of players will generate "solid stuff", or not. I've played a few fun arcs, but nothing so far that blew me away. Even a lot of the 5 star stuff is meh, and makes me think that architects are getting their friends/sg mates to rate them high.
I like that the devs have set a very high bar because HoF and Devs Choice should be hard to get. The majority of writers should not qualify for it because the majority of arcs cannot mathematically be worthy, or they'd need to institute a higher reward... Super Mega Dev Favorite of Awesome level or something.
Also consider that they limited us to 3 published arcs because of server space limitations. Letting us buy publish slots doesn't fix that.
Look at it this way: there have been a lot of authors who have written "good" books. Some people that read them like them... some love them... some are meh to them, and some people hate them. Out of those authors, only a couple of them will hit it big and get multi-book deals. Soem of them get dropped by their publisher and never publish another book again. The popular authors do something that makes folks like their work... something that makes it stand out. try to be that author, not the guy who can't get a deal and spends his own money at cafepress.com.
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The popular authors do something that makes folks like their work... something that makes it stand out. try to be that author, not the guy who can't get a deal and spends his own money at cafepress.com.
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Yeah, they get advertisements.
Kung Ru - 50++ MA/Regen Scrapper
Kalleesta - 50 Necro/Dark MM
Hidden Justice - 44 Kin/Psy Defender
Altaholic
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The flawed assumption being made is that the relative score will instead diverge from normality after reaching a certain point into approaching normality.
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Uh, guy? What do you think "random" means? It means there's no way you can predict what's going to happen. Working assumption is that 30% give random ratings and don't know about 0 stars so they rate a 3 average. This means your arc's at 4.4 if the remaining 70% all rate it 5. If you can get a temporary influx of "sane" people (through word of mouth or whatever) then your arc can crest above 4.5 but after that influx fades the randoms will drag it back down. Or you just get a small stretch of good random luck and you go above 4.5, but then as more people play you hit a bad stretch and drop back down.
I mean, you could make the argument that a hall of fame arc needs constant promotion if it wants to stay hall of fame. I don't think it's a good argument but you could make it. I will continue to say that the steady state of a "perfect" arc is going to be 4.4 or slightly south.
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I am making no argument, I am making an observation and comment on a flawed assumption.
Restated in terms of statistics, the flawed assumption being that as the sample size increase, the margin of error also increases.
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Uh, no. That's in fact the opposite of my point.
You might get lucky and have your arc be above 4.5 at 1000 votes. (expected value 3 variance 2, 300 samples, not outside the realm of possibility.) Or there might be a Markov Chain model where someone can get a temporarily higher sane:insane ratio than 70:30. But in the end it regresses to the mean, which is 4.4 and out of the Hall of Fame.
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Looking through the console, it had received:
35 Fives
8 Fours
4 Threes
8 'unknown'
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How does one go about 'looking through the console' to see this information?
I think the problem right now is there is waaay too much available as it is, the mission list is starting to look like the WWW. Giving out 2 more slots would probably blow the search engine lol.
Obviously HOF is attainable as there are a few arcs already destined for it. This may become a "Popular Kids" vs nerds thing but hopefully the grief nerfing will be controllable.
If you want to play your arcs you can unpublish or play in test mode. If you want them out in the world then think hard before you write a arc and make sure it is what you really want to do.
I am sure at some point they will add a slot or 2 but it will always be limited to keep people from publishing dreck spam.
I wonder if eventually they will end up automatically unpublish arcs that haven't been played in 6 months or whatever. That would clean up the mission list a bit.
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You can't please everyone, so lets concentrate on me.
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Looking through the console, it had received:
35 Fives
8 Fours
4 Threes
8 'unknown'
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How does one go about 'looking through the console' to see this information?
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I would like to know as well.
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I rate everything a 1, because I'm a villain and spite is what we do.
Kiss your HoF goodbye!
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Looking through the console, it had received:
35 Fives
8 Fours
4 Threes
8 'unknown'
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How does one go about 'looking through the console' to see this information?
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I would like to know as well.
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The Mission Architect chat shows you everytime you are rated. You can determine 5, 4, and 3 rates from the number of tickets you get. Everything else is 'unknown' because they don't award tickets.
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HOF missions losing their status is ridiculous.
The bar is high enough that getting over it represents a major achievement and a guarantee of a certain level of quality- where's the logic in 'losing' them at some future date?
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
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We declare the popular vote legitimate enough to get it there, but then say it is no longer relevant if that same group votes it down?
I dunno I'm on the fence, but if we have "faith" in the voting system to work then you can't really pick and chose just because one outcome isn't desirable.
If the people vote you down then you should only have 3 spots just like everyone else. If the mission is strong enough it will achieve a solid HoF and maintain it indefinitely. Assuming we have "faith" in the voting system that is.
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I'd rather look at the extra slot as a one-time reward for acheiving hoF. You don't ask an Olympic Gold Medalist Sprinter to keep winning the event every week in order to keep his medal. If someone gets into the HoF, they should get an extra slot for doing that. if they drop out it doesn't reverse time and change their past success.
Eco.
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sure, but popular vote doesn't decide who wins Olympic medals... (in most sports 
)
I look at it as HoF being elected representatives and while they can get nestled in there pretty well, if enough people speak up they are yanked.
I don't "like" that the slot can be pulled away, but at the same time I've been attacked for saying that the rating system is flawed by people saying it works well and we need to put faith in the players. I see no reason to have it both ways and whether it is a result of shortsightedness, intent, or maybe even a bug, the dev's seem to think that as well.
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The Mission Architect chat shows you everytime you are rated. You can determine 5, 4, and 3 rates from the number of tickets you get. Everything else is 'unknown' because they don't award tickets.
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Ah, okay. 25 tickets = 5 stars, 20 = 4, 15 = 3. Thanks!
Shucks, I haven't been keeping track.
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Looking through the console, it had received:
35 Fives
8 Fours
4 Threes
8 'unknown'
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How does one go about 'looking through the console' to see this information?
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I would like to know as well.
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The Mission Architect chat shows you everytime you are rated. You can determine 5, 4, and 3 rates from the number of tickets you get. Everything else is 'unknown' because they don't award tickets.
[/ QUOTE ]Doesn't it only tell you if you're online when it gets rated, though?
http://www.fimfiction.net/story/36641/My-Little-Exalt
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Doesn't it only tell you if you're online when it gets rated, though?
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Yes. Although if you only have one arc up, and are determined enough to know, you could record the number of votes your arc has, and the number of claimable tickets you have before you log of. Comparing the two when you next log on would tell you what you've missed.
Quite why this information is hidden from the author in the first place is a mystery to me.
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Assuming we have "faith" in the voting system that is.
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I don't, do you? Not complete faith anyway.
Reaching Hall of Fame puts a big target on the arc that just begs the griefer to come by with zero stars. Its probably worse for those who are well known on the forums, because some people will take their disagreements from the forums to the MA ratings. Being able to get the near instant gratification of seeing them lose the HoF status will be more likely to draw them to this tactic than giving a bad rating to an arc on page fourteen.
I say lock it in HoF status, but allow voting to continue and be displayed, just the same as votes should be displayed with the Dev Choice arcs. This way, over time, the ratings will tell the tale, and it will not be as attractive a target for griefers because it can't really be demoted.
I'm not getting why people are upset at the 3-storyarc limit.
Personally, it probably should have started out as 1. There are some people out there that are not in this to tell a good story and just want a way to show off their alt in some kind of uber light. Sad reality is, is 9 times out of ten, I've ended up going into missions and getting one of my 50's one-shotted by a minion. Or, the one I loved, a long mission with no bad guy progression, everything was handled easily, then you open up a door, and get one-shotted by a unknown AV who is obviously the author's pet character.
Some people suck at telling stories, some people are new to the game and don't need to be clogging the world server with 500 stories about made-up unstoppable badasses. The list goes on.
Myself, I have one storyarc that I am working on. I am taking my time, and I keep running through it to make sure it is not impossible or stupid. I suggest others do the same. Does your story have replay quality? Do you really have something new to offer to the community other than showing off your beloved 50 in an ungodly light or creating the ultimate goon death squad? It may sound cool in your head BUT EVERYONE ELSE IS DOING THAT AS WELL.
Stories where I suffered a 'retard death' get one-starred. I have played good stories with good pacing, but sadly, they are very far and few between. Out of 17 random stories, I've 5-starred only 3.
Please, people, think and test this stuff out before you send it live.
'Didn't anyone proofread this $#!tty game before they released it!?' -James, The Angry Video Game Nerd reviewing 'Double Dragon III'
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Uh, no. That's in fact the opposite of my point.
You might get lucky and have your arc be above 4.5 at 1000 votes. (expected value 3 variance 2, 300 samples, not outside the realm of possibility.) Or there might be a Markov Chain model where someone can get a temporarily higher sane:insane ratio than 70:30. But in the end it regresses to the mean, which is 4.4 and out of the Hall of Fame.
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Which is where it should be, if it's true value was 4.4, the problem with flucation around that value is a different issue and leads to volatility yes.
I'm not thinking we're disagreeing on this. I suspect I misinterpreted your post. So to explain myself will just state how I read it .
I read your earlier remark as one saying that there would be a problem in trusting that as additional votes are added to an arc that has achieved HoF status that the arc would return to HoF status, if it should.
Yes, on specific points, the apparant value may be lower than before as the negative case has more of a percieved problem than the positive case. But, as more votes are added, the value should continue to approach normality.
Let's Dance!
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I'm not getting why people are upset at the 3-storyarc limit.
Personally, it probably should have started out as 1
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I've had the crazy idea that actually, we should have had exactly one. But not in the way you might think.
The crazy idea was that rather than being an upload limit the publishing slot represented an advertising limit. Players could upload whatever they wanted up to some higher resource limit, say ten or fifteen arcs. However, the search and browse pages would only show *one* arc of yours; you could only *advertise* one arc. Basically, the devs would be limiting advertising space, not publishing space (at least, not as severely). Butif you knew the ArcID number, you could play any uploaded arc.
The idea here was that players would use the publishing slot to draw attention to their publishing skills, and given that they would try to make that arc the best possible one they thought they had. If players liked it, they could "bookmark" it or "subscribe" to it, and from that arc they could get a list of your other arcs if they wanted to play more from you. If not, they could search for what *other* people thought represented their best work.
To make this work, players could flag any of their "real" arcs as the "published" ones, and the others would simply drop out of search, much like "broken" arcs do now: they would no longer appear in search, but they would not lose ratings and rankings if they were "de-advertised."
So, if you want to make a serious arc, a goofy arc, a canon arc, whatever, you can still do that and have more arcs available for people to play. But to get people to actually play any of them, you have to convince them you're worth their attention, and so you pick the arc you think best represents your skills, and use that to advertise yourself. And because you can change it periodically without losing ratings, you could show different sides of yourself at different times to try to appeal to different groups of players. Long, difficult serious arc one month: short, humorous, silly arc the next.
Actually, the more I think about this crazy idea, the less crazy it sounds to me.
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The crazy idea was that rather than being an upload limit the publishing slot represented an advertising limit.
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I expect something like this would just push people to other places for advertising. You'd end up with a lot more channel chatter advertising missions, and then front missions whose description lists IDs for the authors other missions. It would increase frustration at being unable to find a mission you played before because you don't remember the number. Finally, people would have to turn to external sites to search for missions.
I'd much rather have better ways for searching missions, including level range, etc.
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The crazy idea was that rather than being an upload limit the publishing slot represented an advertising limit.
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I expect something like this would just push people to other places for advertising. You'd end up with a lot more channel chatter advertising missions, and then front missions whose description lists IDs for the authors other missions. It would increase frustration at being unable to find a mission you played before because you don't remember the number. Finally, people would have to turn to external sites to search for missions.
I'd much rather have better ways for searching missions, including level range, etc.
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I'm not sure its a *good* idea, I just think its not a crazy one.
But in response to your comments above:
1. Forcing players to advertise elsewhere outside the game is not as problematic as it seems, because the vast majority of players are unlikely to use those search systems, and the intent of the idea is to consider the search space in-game itself as the more critical limited resource, not the storage associated with the published missions. In other words, basically working as intended.
2. Front missions listing IDs is also working as intended, insofar as unless that mission itself is a good one, listing IDs is of no value.
3. It would not be difficult to ensure that once a player played a mission once, it displayed in a list of previously played missions whether it was listed in global search or not.
4. People don't *have* to search for missions in external sites. They may or may not *want* to, but that's a totally different issue.
There is *no* "better way" of searching for missions that allows players to publish without limit, because the problem (at least the one I'm referencing here) has nothing to do with being unable to find something you have a specific criteria to find. The issue is more one of being able to effectively browse.
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HOF missions losing their status is ridiculous.
The bar is high enough that getting over it represents a major achievement and a guarantee of a certain level of quality- where's the logic in 'losing' them at some future date?
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
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We declare the popular vote legitimate enough to get it there, but then say it is no longer relevant if that same group votes it down?
I dunno I'm on the fence, but if we have "faith" in the voting system to work then you can't really pick and chose just because one outcome isn't desirable.
If the people vote you down then you should only have 3 spots just like everyone else. If the mission is strong enough it will achieve a solid HoF and maintain it indefinitely. Assuming we have "faith" in the voting system that is.