Hall of Fame requirements need revisiting

"Consequences of War" was also one that bit the big one in the last few days. A three, four, and a one or two, all without comment, knocked it back into four star limbo to waste away with its sequel, "Casualties..."

Given that it'll probably take a half dozen fives in a row to put either of them back, I think I'll just shrug and walk away from the AE for now. It's become obvious that, despite the efforts of Wrong Number, Bubbawheat and others, the powers that be simply don't care. The battle's just not worth fighting any longer.

I'm having far too much fun with Dragon Age, and far fewer headaches. You guys have fun. I'll be lurking.

That is one of the most infuriating things I've seen that shows that the sorting function wholeheartedly stinks. How in the world can an arc go from 925 plays and 5 stars, the very first arc (non DC/GA/HoF) and after probably 1-2 votes get knocked down to page 21 for 4-star rated arcs? That makes no sense whatsoever!

And I just realized that the default sort order for all arcs goes like this:

Guest Author
Dev Choice
Hall of Fame
5-star arcs
unplayed arcs
1-star arcs
2-star arcs
3-star arcs
4 star arcs

Really? Really? I mean, really?

Community-driven content rating systems are not easy to do right. However, I feel the developers somewhat dropped the ball in failing to look at other existing systems - including the forums of their own game! - and how their design contributed to their success or failure. And they really dropped the ball in assigning a low priority to addressing the issues with the content rating system.

The ideal system would bring fresh, interesting content to the top of the heap, encouraging authors to keep innovating and players to keep playing. The current system has strong disincentives for the most prolific and skilled authors to create new content, and no incentives for the players to seek out new content.

Or, see sig.

Thanks for the goodwill Teen Phalanx had a good run on page 3, perhaps it's about time for a new arc to take the top non-DC/non-HoF spot for a bit.

No regrets here. Even a 1-star vote puts me one vote closer to HoF

While I sympathize with some of the sentiments expressed here, I don't think lowering the bar on Hall of Fame is a magic bullet that would cure all of Mission Architect's ills.

If they lowered the threshold to 800 plays, 500 plays, even 200 plays, the order that story arcs are presented in the default search would be exactly the same. The 5-star arcs vaulted into the Hall of Fame would be in exactly the same place in the search -- just below the current Hall of Fame arcs, just above the arcs with 5 stars and slightly less plays. This would give the authors who got recognized a warm fuzzy feeling and another arc slot, but IMHO this would do nothing to address the major problems Mission Architect currently has.

Since I'm on a soapbox already, here's what I think Mission Architect's major problems are:

1. Most players think Mission Architect is for farming. Efficient farms get infinitely more plays than well-written stories. This problem requires changing people's perceptions, and will be hard to solve. Stomping the various exploits as the devs have been doing is good for curbing the bad behavior, but I think the devs also need to do a better job of rewarding good behavior (i.e., more promotion of story-oriented arcs).

2. The players who do want to play well-written stories have a hard time actually finding them. As stated earlier, randomly looking through the current MA search tool results in a lot of farms, unfinished arcs, and low quality arcs. This could be solved by improving the search interface, changing the rating system, clearing out deadwood, adding favorites lists ... many possible ways, really. I created the "Contact Tree for MA" project specifically to try to help with this problem; this only reaches people willing to read this forum, though. The best solutions will require user interface changes that need to come from the devs.

3. Mission Architect is old news now, and no new content encourages you to do MA. MA was so very hot in I14. But now in I19, hardly anyone still cares; players don't go in MA except to farm. We got a few new maps, but aside from that, none of the new I19 features are integrated with MA. As a result, interest in MA is stagnating.

Specific example: I19 makes you go to Ouroboros to do Mender Ramiel's arc, and sends you to talk to Lady Grey in RWZ (from I10) to do a mission for her. Once you have the Alpha slot unlocked, getting salvage to make boosts encourages you to do the ITF (from I12), LGTF (from I10), STF (from I9), RSF (from I7), Cathedral of Pain (from I18), and the Kahn/Barracuda TFs (from I15). Tons of content from previous issues get tied into the current story, but you'll note that none of this stuff comes from Mission Architect or ties into MA in any way. I don't think you can even get incarnate shards in Mission Architect. Everyone I know is hot to get incarnate salvage and craft boosts for their alpha slot right now. Why would anyone want to spend time in MA right now? I love MA and even I have a hard time justifying doing anything MA related until I catch up with the I19 content.


Anyway, that's my opinion on the main things that are holding Mission Architect back. It is such a cool feature - I wish they would do a little more to keep it alive.

January 2011 update. Lost a several this month and picked up one new one.

As of January 1st we now have the following breakdown of arcs with 100 or more plays and that are still rated at 5 stars.

Of note this month is that this is the first time post I-15 arcs outnumber MA month one arcs on the list.

Arcs Published Pre-15 - 3 (All of these were published in April 09)
Arcs Published Post I-15 - 4

Total Number of arcs out of 69,728 arcs - 7

Put another way: .0001003% of the arcs in the system have more than 100 plays while still maintaining a 5 star rating.

Percentage of current HoF Arcs Published in 4/09 - 100%

History
May - 12 (11/1)
June - 14 (11/3)
July - 14 (11/3)
August - 11 (8/3)
September - 11 (7/4)
October - 10 (8/2)
November - 13 (10/3)
December - 10 (7/3)
January - 7 (3/4)

Also of note this month is that it has been a year now since our last DC not given out as part of a contest was awarded.


WN

Hmmm . . . what do you attribute the drop in the total number of HOF arcs to? We had 10 -14 and now we only have 7.

My bad. What do you attribute the drop in 5 star x100 play arcs?

Most likely someone have found them and rated them lower than 5 stars which has caused their average ratings to drop below 4.51.

I think part of the problem at least is that there are no requirements for creating MA missions. At least no requirements to make story oriented arcs the only arcs available.

I personally have gotten to the point where I only do arcs advertised on the forums or already have HoF, Dec Choice, or whatever the other one is that I can't think of the name of right now.

The majority of any arc with a 5 star rating seem to be mainly farms which makes it difficult to find anything worth doing that wasn't just designed to be a farm.

Farms can be easily spotted though as the enemy groups tend to only spawn bosses. There should be some kind of requirement demanding that every custom group have Minions, Lt., and bosses in them. This would prevent arcs that are only farms from being published in the first place.

Another exploit is the allies being created who have only buffs and heals with no real attack capabilities. This too could be programed so that every custom character must have at least 1 attack capability.

Finally there is currently nothing preventing you from publishing a story arc without testing it first and I feel that story arcs must be tested before they can be eligible for publish.

There are some other things that would make it an obvious farm to a player but that the system may not be programed to recognize or could get confused with legitimate story arcs. For that stuff there is currently a "report" button on story arcs but I think this is more to do with weather or not profanities or copy right claims were violated. I'm not sure if you can use this feature to just flag a story arc as being a farm. I think the report feature could be reworked to operate just like the rating system. Have check boxes for "Trade Mark/Copy Right violation", "Profanity Warning", and "Farm or other exploits" then you can explain what the issue is in the comments section which will be sent to the Author and the devs. I'm thinking every time a story arc is flagged for the same offense by multiple accounts, each time it'll loose a rating and be unable to gain that rating back. (5 becomes 4, 4 to 3, 3 to 2, 2 to 1, 1 to 0, 0 to unpublished) In order to regain ratings if an arc is flagged for fake reasons a petition can be sent to developers to review the arc and remove the flag. (Not if an arch is new and has a 0 rating on the first flag it'll still need to be flagged by 6 or more people to cause it to be unpublished.)

February 2011 update. We picked up a new one this month and Teen Phalanx Forever! returned to page 3!

As of February 1st we now have the following breakdown of arcs with 100 or more plays and that are still rated at 5 stars.

Arcs Published Pre-15 - 4(All of these were published in April 09)
Arcs Published Post I-15 - 4

Total Number of arcs out of 70,249 arcs - 8

Put another way: .0001138% of the arcs in the system have more than 100 plays while still maintaining a 5 star rating. THX-1138 anyone? What? I swear I'm not a nerd girl! Did you know that was also Princess Leia's cell number in Star Wars? OK, OK, maybe a little...

Percentage of current HoF Arcs Published in 4/09 - 100%

History
May - 12 (11/1)
June - 14 (11/3)
July - 14 (11/3)
August - 11 (8/3)
September - 11 (7/4)
October - 10 (8/2)
November - 13 (10/3)
December - 10 (7/3)
January - 7 (3/4)
February - 8 (4/4)

Also of note is that it has been over a year now since our last DC not given out as part of a contest was awarded.


WN