More solutions for fixing the MA

Solution 1:
Let us report arcs as potential exploits.

When an arc has been reported enough times it should be locked, automatically. A GM will then inspect the arc and if the arc is not an exploit it is unlocked and flagged in such a way that it can't be locked again. If the arc is republished the flag goes away and it can once again be locked if it is reported enough times.

Should the arc upon inspection prove to be abusing an exploit it will of course not be unlocked and appropriate action may be taken against the author, such as revoking all MA publishing rights (and giving their slots to me as a reward for coming up with this idea).


Solution 2:

Change ratings from stars to like/dislike. This would make it harder to grief by rating down arcs. It would also remedy the current situation of only 5-star arcs being noticed in searches.


Solution 3:

Make every completed play of an arc count.

Right now, even if someone loves an arc so much that they want to play it on all their alts, only one play counts. This is bad, especially considering that one of the requirements for the Hall of Fame is a large (ridiculously so) number of plays.

Make every completed play count. That would more accurately represent an arcs true popularity. Maybe there should be a time limit to prevent farming or gaming of the system, but I don't really know if that's necessary.

Since it's apparently not obvious to everyone I'll point out that I don't think we should be allowed to RATE an arc with every playthrough. Just that each playthrough should count for the numbers of plays displayed, and for the purpose of things like Hall of Fame, etc.

Solution 1... sure. I'm pretty much jaded to any ifs-ands-or-buts excuses on farms at this point. Quite frankly, I'd rather drive away people too stupid to read the in-game information about what not to do than put up with the pox of clamouring whiners we have who are so insensitive about their story that the diminishment of XP earning directly translate to a complete failure of the whole system.

Solution 2. I like this idea a lot, especially since right now, the granulised system is really bad and awkward for review purposes. What makes an arc 5 star for me might not make it a 5 star for someone else. All we have at this point is a system which blitheringly tries to quantify 'liked it' and 'disliked it,' and handles it badly.

Solution 3. Farms get run a lot. :\

Heroes, Villains ♦ Reviews ♦ Retrospect

Farms sure do get run a lot.

And the dead never change.

Heroes, Villains ♦ Reviews ♦ Retrospect

Interesting ideas!

#1 - Sounds good, but there would need to be a punishment for false reporting or it could be abused. I vote that the extra slots are donated to charity though...

#2 - Excellent idea, hope it gets implemented. The star system is in need of a huge overhaul!

#3 - I like the idea of character based versus account based reviews! Every play might be a bit much - as stated by others, farms do get run alot...

Devs, I hope you are listening to FredrikSvanberg, he makes alot of sense!

I like all of them. Of course the biggest hot button for me is the review system overhaul.

WN

Though it's a bit late to be implemented now, the best method of improving the MA would be to take the AE buildings out of Mercy Isle and Atlas Park.

It'll still help a little.

Good things, yes.

2: I still think there should be several categories to rate an arc in, though.
Like Story, Characters, and Action. Maybe also Difficulty.
Because how great someone finds an arc overall does not tell what they liked about it and stories that got rated low for something you wont mind at all or might explicitly be looking for (e.g. good Story, little Action) will be lost down there under the big pile of high-rated ones. With several categories you could look for a story with great X, and a bad Y value wont keep it from showing up at the top of that list. Just making stars into "I like" wont help that.

Those things are already handled by categories, keywords and the arc's description. If you're going to introduce ratings for all those things we have as keywords now it will just cause an even greater mess, since the basic problem with ratings is that there is no yardstick by which everyone measures these things. Something that is 5-star Action for you might only count as 3 stars of Action for me, and 1 star for someone else. And so on.

Since it's all subjective anyway, why try to put a number on it? You either like it or you don't; that's entirely subjective and easy to figure out, and by finding out how well liked an arc is (ratio of "likes" to total number of plays, for example) everyone can see that an arc is either generally well liked or not. If a lot of people like an arc it's a good chance that other people will also like it, including you, so try it out and see. At least with a different kind of ratings system there wouldn't be a cut-off at 5 stars below which nobody can find anything. Searching for arcs would no longer depend upon the almighty 5-star rating.

Another reason for changing the ratings system would be to make things easier for everyone. We have today a problem with people thinking that they must click each star in order to get to the number they want, so they start out by clicking star number 1, then 2, then 3, etc. The author gets a note saying that someone has voted for his arc, but no tickets, so he knows someone voted less than 3 stars and thinks that is the final score, but the final score is in fact the last star the player has clicked. This is not intuitive! If you only can choose "like" or "dislike" - heck, there doesn't even have to be a "dislike" option - it is less likely to cause similar confusion.

I haven't even started talking about people who don't rate arcs because they don't know what the stars mean; or because they only rate farms; or because they don't want to rate an arc if they can't give it 5 stars because they don't want to punish the author by condemning the arc to 4-star oblivion. And I'm sure there are many more reasons out there for why someone won't rate an arc they have just played. I'm equally sure that a large number of those reasons can be solved by making the entire process simpler.

Maybe I'm overlooking something major here, but what are these similar systems? Are they in this game, or are you referencing features in another game that operate this way? Honestly, the "report content" button is more than enough, as I'm reasonably sure every reported arc is looked over at some point by CS staff. Even if your method were to become the de facto way of doing it, it wouldn't stop people from simply republishing their arcs to clear all the reports against them.

Fix PvP first.

1) will lead to griefing. Also, the CS staff doesn't have the manpower to do what it needs to do now.

2) will not help. We don't have four-star oblivion now; we have five-star oblivion. There are over 100 pages of five-star arcs, so even if you have a five-star arc it's being thrown into a pile no one is going to grovel over to find it.

3) helps farms more than legit arcs and will exacerbate gaming the system.

So that's a "no" all the way around, I'd say.