Hall of Fame requirements need revisiting

I have been meaning to write something about the current Hall of Fame requirements and Quinch's arc (congratz again!) reaching it has finally motivated me to do it.

The current Hall of Fame requirements are ridiculously out of proportion considering the current level of plays arcs are receiving since I15 was released. Since there has been no mention of any changes happening at any time in the future I'm going with the assumption that no new revisions to it are currently planned in the near future.

Some data:

There are 7 HoF arcs. All were published between 4/8/09 and 4/18/09.

Currently there are only 12 out of tens of thousands of arcs with over 100 plays that have maintained a 5 star rating. Of those, 10 were published during 4/09, 1 in 5/09, 1 in 6/09 and 1 in 11/09. So 11 of 12 were published pre-I15.

The arc published in 11/09 in my arc The Golden Age Secret of the Paragon Society so I am very aware of number of plays it gets from week to week. Additionally, the arc closest is Teen Freedom Phalanx Forever! by PW who is a member of the MA Super Team and a person I am very friendly with so I tend to notice TFP! plays.

Paragon Society was published 7 months ago and in that time has received 161 plays. this is an average of 23 a month. Assuming the arc maintains it's rating and continues that average, which will never happen since 50% of the plays the arc got were in the first 2 months, it will still take over three years to achieve HoF.

Teen Freedom Phalanx Forever! is currently at 847 plays. The day I published Paragon Society, seven months ago, I noted that it had 778 plays. This means in the last 7 months it has received 69 plays. Rounding slightly up that is 10 plays per month on average. At that rate assuming it maintains it's rating it will take over 15 more months to reach HoF.

Applying that more realistic 10 plays per month to Paragon Society means about 84 months or 7 years to reach HoF.

In summary, it appears that any arc not published before I15 has no real chance of achieving Hall of Fame status. Seeing that this is the only way other than receiving a Developer's Choice that a player is granted another free arc slot I feel it needs to be adjusted to a more realistic and achievable goal.


WN

They've needed revisiting for quite some time. 1000 plays and 5 star average is practically impossible. 100 plays and 5 stars is pretty hard to get as well. The *shiny* nature of MA wore off quite a long time ago.

Very good points, WN. Some questions probably worth discussing: just how many HoF arcs should there be compared to the number of DC arcs? Roughly the same? Half as many? Twice as many? One-tenth? Should there be no relationship between them at all. While some on these forums may argue that - I personally think the system should be set up so that HoF grants authors "free slots" about as often as DC does?

Or, another way to phrase the question independent of DC arcs would be what should be the average rate HoF arcs are appearing? One a month? Six a year? One a year?

Depending on the answer to the above questions, then what requirements would be needed to get HoF to DC to about the correct ratio - and do they seem to be reasonable requirements?

If they dropped the requirement to 5 stars over 500 plays there would be two more arcs that meet it right now.

If they dropped it to 250 there would be five more. If they drop it to 200 there would be six more.

If they wiped all ratings from people who hadn't actually completed the arc there would probably be another glut of five-star arcs like there was when they wiped all the 0-star ratings. Some of those might qualify for Hall of Fame if the required number of plays were lower.

I have trouble getting even a single person to play my stories! A thousand seems impossible!

Personally, rather than asking that the devs lower the bar for the number of unique plays required, I would much prefer that the devs work on growing the pool of active MA players, by making story-oriented MA arcs something that players want to do, and are excited about. More people actively playing MA arcs would mean more arcs would get more plays, and more HoF arcs being crowned would naturally follow.

For awhile it looked like we were going in that direction, with the various events Dr. Aeon sponsored, which I thought were quire well received. Right now, however, it doesn't feel like that's happening. Though I do believe the devs want Mission Architect to succeed, and I absolutely agree that exploits need to be quashed, in my opinion the last patch was much too punitive towards legitimate story arcs. This ended up hurting the level of player interest in Mission Architect, and not enough has been done to correct that.

I've been enjoying doing AE missions for a few weeks now. Sure, some are pretty bad. Enemies are too hard, story doesn't make sense and so forth.

However I've played a few jewels amongst them. And not only HoF and Dev Choice ones. For me, the story of a AM is most important.

A few tips I think would do wonders:
1- Have contests (From what I've read Dr. Aeon used to do that?)
2- Ask Off the Cape to promote a story arc in their podcast.
3- Ask Cape Radio & Rogue Radio to put out a ad on air.

(2: http://offthecape.com/)
(3: http://thecaperadio.com/ & http://www.roguesradio.com/index.php)

I already suggested Off the Cape to post their fav. AE mission on their thread over at Multi-Media, but I'm not sure if they'll read that.

Just putting it out there for now.

-El Bellaco

I love Architect and really do wish they would do something about the HoF.

My only suggestion lower the star requirement to anything 4+. Mostly becuase I've seen some really well done story arcs that have become the victim of TL;DR and gotten a few bad stars from that. Slow to start stories don't always mean the arc over all is bad.

IDK just my point of view.

I think this is a great idea. The bar could be set at 100 5-star votes (ignoring all other types of votes) which is not the same as 100-and-5-star-average. Having a hundred people love your arc as much as possible seems Hall-of-Fame-worthy, and counting only 5-star votes eliminates griefing. Sure, it also rewards good marketing / campaigning, but that's already a big factor in getting so many plays.

As I understand it, the HoF status is calculated on the fly, so if the devs later find the bar is too low, they can just set it higher again.

None of my arcs qualify for 100 5-star votes, I simply am not making enough effort (in terms of content AND marketing) to deserve it yet. But I do plan to try harder, once I know it's worth xp to play them. I might then find 100 players, but probably not 100 5-stars. Others are more worthy.

I don't think there's any way to adjust for the heady days of April 2009. You could start counting 5-stars from today, but it wouldn't be fair to expect people to play arcs again.

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!

I agree that the Hall of Fame requirements should be lowered - it's telling when there is almost twice the number of arcs promoted by the developers themselves than those promoted by players at large.

The five-star rating is remarkably difficult to achieve, not only requiring simultaneously catering to vastly differing tastes, but being statistically doubly as difficult to achieve as two-through-four stars*, but also having to compensate for the first-click bug**.

First step would be the already-proposed lowering of ratings requirements. Few people are eager to test out an arc simply on the word of its own creator, let alone actively seek them out as opposed to running more reliable regular content. While popularity or at least exposure should be a prerequisite for rising above the masses, there is no need for it to be quite so unrelenting.

Another step would be implementing additional tiers the arcs which fulfilled the rating quantity criteria but not the rating itself. Thus in addition to Hall of Fame have Best of the Rest, Mainstream, Lowest Common Denominator and Masochist Bait. More stages of qualification would increase the gradient of quality or at least popularity and make the arc pool less sharply delineated.


* for example, a two-star arc has a ratings range of 1.5 through 2.5, with a full point range, but a five-star one only has the range between 4.5 and 5, with only half point
** unless it has been fixed in the meantime, the arc automatically registers the first rating you clicked, rather the one standing before you close the window. Thus, if you click on three stars, but then change your mind and click on four, only the three-star rating will hold.

An open letter to NCsoft

This is a pretty interesting thread. When AE first came out that the ratio of HoF arcs and Dev Choice would actually be reversed, but look where we are now. :P

Something should be done I feel about making HoF more common (funny as that phrase sounds). The idea of 100 5-star votes irregardless of other votes seems like a good idea to me except when I remember how few plays anything is getting these days. My first arc was published like a month or three after AE came out and has a total of I think 137 or something; no other arc of mine has more than 100, I think the next highest is like 70-something (and that was after two of them have been nominated in one of the player-run contests and receiving a number of favorable reviews too). And I think my last non-"friend-play" was close to a month ago or even more. It didn't help that my most popular got kicked from the five-star category into four-star purgatory after about 60 plays.

So maybe that's just me judging the idea by own yardstick, I'll admit. But they do need to add something in to make people want to play the actual stories instead of just farming or exploits. Heaven knows what though.

I also agree that the HoF requirements should be lowered. I think that it would be nearly impossible for any recently published arc to reach 1000 plays at 5 stars.

I am not sure what I think the new number should be. It depends on how rare HOF should be. If the goal is extremely rare, I would go with 200 or 250.

If HOF should be something hard but attainable, I would go with 100 and 5 stars.

I can understand why previous HOF winners might not like this because they feel it devalues what they achieved. Perhaps a slightly different emblem could mark HOF with 5 stars and 1000 plays?

Something else to keep in mind is the fact that most everyone that has created arcs with over 100 plays with a five star average have advertised the heck out of those arcs. Had the authors not created threads devoting their time to critiquing other arcs or spend innumerable hours hawking their arcs to these people and actively critiquing these people's arcs, most of the over-100-play arcs would likely be wallowing in limbo, too.

While HoF should not come without effort on the author's part, that effort should be in crafting a strong story, utilizing the tools made available through the MA, and working to fine tune the arc into the best work possible. There is a fine line between seeking feedback in order to make an arc better and pimping yourself out just to get plays. The current system asks good authors to don fur coats and twenty pounds of bling.

I have to agree with lowering the HoF requirements drastically. As it stands, it is just far too difficult for an arc to even have a real fighting chance at it, regardless of quality.

I approach the "why" from a different perspective. I have a Dev's Choice Arc, quite possibly the DC Arc with more promotion than any other arc in the game (including the Guest Author arcs) because it was not just featured by the Dev's in many places for a long period of time, but because it won two awards from them. So, let's look at what this one DC arc has going for it it terms of advantages most arcs do not:

1) Selected as a Nominee by the Devs for the 09 AE Awards.
2) Won its category at the 09 AE Awards.
3) Won the top honor at the 09 AE Awards.
4) Because of the above, was promoted on the forums and main site by the Devs.
5) Promoted to Developer's Choice and was "front page" for many many months.
6) Was nominated for the Player Choice Awards.
7) First Runner up in its Player's Choice Category.
8) Because of all the above, was featured in several off-site web articles.
9) Because of the above was mentioned in several more off-site web articles.
10) Has been live since day one of the AE system.

So, thanks to all the above, one would expect it would have a sizable number of ratings, at least enough to get to HoF status (were it not already a Dev's Choice). Nope, 724 ratings as of this moment.

If, given all those advantages an arc cannot, in the course of more than a year, reach the number of ratings (never mind the 4.5-5 stars needed) for HoF status, what chance do most arcs, even exceptional arcs, without those advantages have?