Official Awards Results

The Official Award Results send a message that should encourage us all. Do not give up on your arc because of a bad review from a board critic or because you are stuck at 4 stars with few plays. These results send that message loud and clear:

Best Hero Story Finalists:
• Teen Phalanx Forever! - 67335 – PW – 682 votes 5 stars
• The Most Important Thing - 266877 – Aisynia – 41 votes 4 stars
• Escalation - 6143 – FemFury – 211 votes 4 stars

And the winner was The Most Important Thing

This arc trashed by some board critics and the author was so discouraged by a 3 star review from PW he was going to pull his arc. (I feel his pain there as she is awesome and honestly I felt the same way)

Best Original Story:
• Sabrina's Tale - 1237 – Redbone – 148 plays – 4 stars
• Death to Disco! - 84420 - Wrong Number – 362 plays 4 stars
• Ctrl + Alt + Reset! Aka Time Loop - 137561 – Bubbawheat – 238 plays – 4 stars

I did not play the winning arc but I thought both of the other 2 were awesome. Note that all of the finalists for Original Story are sitting at 4 stars in game.

Sarbrina's Tale won arc of the year with a 4 star in game rating and 148 plays.


This post is not meant to express negative feelings about board reviewers. In fact I want to thank each and every one that took the time to review my arc. Every review was helpful and the process, though sometimes painful, made my arc better.

What I want people to take away from this is, use the board reviewers as much as you can. They have great insight and provide perspectives which are different from your own.

Just don't let a negative review make you give up. Arcs that are hated by some can be really loved by others.

Indeed, and grats to all the winners.

I don't even bother reading the ramblings of the self-declared critics. I write whatever I want to write; things that interest me, gameplay styles I enjoy, stories I want to tell. Then, let the chips fall where they may.

I didn't even posted a discussion/review thread to the boards for the villain arc I won for, I just published it and was surprised when it didn't hover around 4 stars like all my other arcs do... so, I figured it might be worth a shot.

If you must write, write. If someone doesn't like it, oh well.

It depends what your goals are, Two Flower. If you're trying to create something you enjoy and aren't concerned with how it's received, then more power to you. At least one of my arcs is completely and totally written that way and I feel it's a perfectly valid thing to do.

If you're trying to thrust it into the "mainstream," then you need to take other peoples' opinions into account. The general audience is going to expect x, y, and z and you're going to have a really hard time being taken seriously if you don't acknowledge that. I'm sure you and I can both point out some artists from all sorts of media that have defied that, but they're the exception, not the rule.

Did I miss something? Where was it that Police Woman was compared to Simon Cowell? I can see a couple of other reviewers earning that honor on occasion, but PW... No way!

On that subject, I think you'll find that most reviewers start out with the intention of being nice and polite and helpful. Unfotortunately, what quickly happens in most cases is that they become jaded due to a variety of factors. They tend to see a lot of material and it all bleeds together.

For example, when GlaziusF reviewed my arc, one of the things he downgraded me for was me using the Mayhem's Hospital map. That mission featured a hospital and the only map I could find that featured hospital trappings was that one. So I considered that particular criticism a bit unfair on his part. But his experience is his experience. If he finds the hospital map to be overused and he has had to play through it numerous times, then in his eyes, the criticism is valid.

I think it's far better as an author to take someone's criticism holistically, especially when the specific criticisms they offer either don't seem to make much sense or are completely personal preferences about which way they would have taken the story. In the first case, either one of two things happened. As a writer, you didn't convey your intent properly. Or as an audience member, he didn't pay much attention to what was writtern and what was going on. Without a telescope into his mind, it is impossible to tell which actually happened.

In the second case, you have no control over what someone's personal preferences, likes and dislikes are. As a writer, all you can do is try to tell the best story you can tell.

However, what reviews DO is offer you an encapsulated view of a potential audience member's reaction to what you've created. If the audience member dislikes it in general, no matter what his specific criticisms are, then it probably needs more work. If the audience member likes it in general, then you've probably reached the stage where it no longer needs much more than minor tinkering.

In either case, I don't think most reviewers are doing what they are doing to be snarky or to be jerks about it. Some of them probably honestly want to help people produce the best product they can and believe this is the best way of going about it. However, at a certain point, I think if you look at what you are doing and finding that you are rating every arc a '2' these days, it might be time to take a step back and not review for awhile, because it's likely that you've lost your perspective.

Not to mention the damage you are potentially doing to an author whose arc id# is NOT 1000 or so and whose arc doesn't have many plays. When you rate the neophyte author's arc a 2 and the arc id is say 400000, you've pretty much consigned that author's work to never being seen because frankly people just don't play arcs that only have 1 or 2 stars.

No, Twoflower did not name names, only "reviewers". Painting them all with the same brush, despite recommending friends and strangers check out your arc. Perhaps concise to a fault?

Anyway. It is nice if a stranger's review comes in a PM, but an interesting review might also garner the arc a few extra plays if it's posted. That doesn't always work as intended, even for those reviewers who aren't vicious by default. We can only hope to improve.

Arc: 379017: Outbroken See all your old friends in the Outbreak Tutorial sequel!
Arc: Coming Soon: The Incarnate Shadow Shard of Fire and Ice Mender Rednem needs you!
Massively.com opinion poll: Please Help Save CoH!

One other thing to consider when taking a reviewer's opinion into consideration is the fact it's... well... a review. In many cases they were likely stopping to take copious notes, sometimes taking screen shots, and generally approaching the run from a work perspective. Having run several arcs from the same perspective, I can attest to the fact that it definitely interferes with a person's ability to enjoy the arc and see it as a whole.

Some reviewers have more difficulty with this than others, but I suspect they all experience this to some extent, which is why reviewers tend to grade more critically than the average Joe that runs your arc for the heck of it.

Then there's the opposing viewpoint: arcs with low ID numbers were written in the early days of AE, when authors weren't as aware of the tools available to make a good arc. Also, options were fewer. Those high ratings may very well be holdovers from the days when players had lower standards.

Aside from that, some older arcs with a lot of good ratings haven't been updated in ages.

Those 0-star ratings that some griefers were handing out have since been removed. Of course there were plenty who didn't know you could 0-star an arc, and their 1-star votes remain.