Would you unpublish a revamped arc with 165 Plays?

OK, as stated many times, I'm long out of arc slots and therefore ineligible to enter the new challenge without deleting an existing arc. This past Saturday while playing some of the challenges with the MA Super Team it became apparent that some reaching (submitting arcs that barely met the outlined goal of the challenge) was being done in the selection of arcs submitted. After a night of sleeping on it I realized that the first arc I published almost perfectly met the requirements already. Why did I not realize before now? Got me.

The arc in question is: "Have a Blap, Blap, Blappy Day Kids!"- Arc ID: 2019. After a play through of the arc on Sunday it was clear just how far I've come in my authoring skills since I last worked on this arc. After the play through I had several notebook pages of changes I wanted to make, contest or not just to make it a better arc.

I've started modifying the existing arc, but realize that all of this work is likely to go mostly unseen since the arc has been trapped in 4 star hell for over a year. It gets maybe a play every two months or so which means it's pretty guaranteed to stay star at 4 stars for the foreseeable future (ironically it just got a 5 star play on Sunday).

The big question is: Do I continue to work on the existing arc or unpublish loosing 165 ratings? The story itself I would say is 75% the same, but is being expanded, greatly improved and tailored to focus more on the main character of the story (not Blappy btw).

I just hate the idea of loosing that number of plays, but if I'm putting another 20 plus hours into the arc I want it to get played. This is a tough call. Opinions?


WN

I wouldn't unpublish it, but to be fair, I'd be amazed to have 100+ plays. I'm happy with an arc that gets 8. :-P

I guess it would boil down to what you value more: The # of plays or remaking it into something better.

I hope you get a lot of opinions on this; I'd actually be interested to see what people think about it as well.

Mine is don't unpublish it (although, in your place, I'd still make the edits to the published version). I honestly don't think it'll get any more plays that way. Basically, I'm of the opinion that having more than a few dozen plays, even at a four star rating, is giving it a play rate that is higher than just about any one of my arcs that has few plays.

In other words, a five star rating, without a lot of plays, IMO, results in an even slower play rate than four stars and a lot of plays. I've got two arcs with five stars, one with 11 and one with 2 plays. I've got one with four stars, and about fifty plays. I'm fairly sure that perhaps the one with 11 and 50 have had one or two plays thus far this year. The one with 2 plays hasn't gotten one at all. And I actually put hours into updating it (albeit just because I wanted to, not really to increase the rate it got plays). I've got one arc with about 80 plays, four stars, and it gets a play (like your arc) about once a month or two.

So it seems to me that the number of plays the arc's already got is more important than the rating *at least for arcs that don't already have a few hundred plays.* So I wouldn't unpublish it.

I'd definitely not unpublish an arc with 165 plays. Unless AE gets some major changes, there's no way you'll get that many plays normally for a new arc, IMO. You are lucky to get more than 10 (and that's with 5 people in your SG playing it on day 1); going on personal experience here. :/

I'll elaborate. I have 5 arcs currently:
- the first one was made before the 'big AE nerf', and has the most plays (it's also the most critically acclaimed because people actually played it ) at 47. It's at the point where getting a 5-vote would put it into 5-star territory, but it has received only one play in the past 9 months.
- the second one was made for Aeon's second challenge; it has 17 plays (SGmates, reviewers, and other contestants for the challenge, mostly). It received zero plays since the challenge.
- the third and fourth ones were made a month ago with standard advertisement ingame / on the forums; they have received exactly *one* 'random play' (outside SGmates and explicit solicitations), even though they both sit at a 5.0 star average and 10-5 plays respectively (!)
- I finished my fifth arc for the 3rd Aeon Challenge just a day ago, so no data yet.

So yeah, I definitely wouldn't unpublish an arc that has more than 50 plays, even if it's in 4-star land. I would basically rewrite the arc I was least satisfied with (without unpublishing it) and keep the plays, *especially* if you think the arc might get over the 4.5 hurdle with a few good ratings.


-- Z.

This question of to un/republish or not is not as cut and dry as some might think because till now I have been of the opinion that an arc would not be removed if it meets any of this criteria:

1) It's less than six months old

2) It is currently rated 5 stars

3) It has won some kind of award

The data I've been tracking for my Hall of Fame thread and the experience with my own arcs is what's making me think unpublishing might be worth considering even though it has 166 plays.

Currently I have eight arc slots filled with these arcs:

The Golden Age Secret of the Paragon Society - 244 Plays, 5 stars

A Hero in Need...is a Friend Indeed! - 199 Plays, 5 stars

The Ms. Manners Task Force - 15 Plays, 5 stars, Less than 6 Months Old

Old Dog, New Trick - 45 Plays, 4 stars, Less than 6 Months Old

In Poor Taste – 148 Plays 4 stars, 2009 Player's Choice Winner Best Comedy

Death to Disco! – 414 Plays 4 stars, 2009 Official AE Awards Nominee Best Original Story

Trademark Infringement – 514 Plays, 4 stars, Player's Choice Winner Best Original Character Group

Have a Blap, Blap, Blappy Day Kids! – 166 Plays, 4 stars


An additional important fact to consider is that "The Golden Age Secret of the Paragon Society" was published in 11/2009 and "A Hero in Need...is a Friend Indeed!" was published in 2/2010. This shows that it's possible that a republish arc has a shot (though a long one) of actually doing better.

WN

Well, your situation is very different from mine wrt getting your arcs played, so I'm not sure how well my experiences can apply in this case.

But still, the arc is probably close enough to 4.5 (I imagine it was mostly well-received) that getting a dozen 5-star plays might just catapult the new-old arc to instant page 1 status. From those numbers I'd say that is likely -- you seem to be getting a lot of plays on even your newer arcs, and challenge arcs tend to get a rush of plays either way. To me it seems to be a smaller gamble than starting afresh.

That's just my opinion, though!


-- Z.

Absolutely not. I'm regretting unpublishing both of my arcs back when they only had 40 plus plays. At this point in AR development (and I use that term loosely), you may never make it back up.

After having looked over your list of arcs, and having played each of them, I'd second my motion. Tweak away, but they're all solid arcs. Until they make some changes in the AE that let us know what tools we may end up having at our disposal to improve our arcs and get more plays, I'd leave them all.

Where do you see the number of plays on the arc? The other day I published my first arc in years, inspired by Going Rogue and some of my games outside of CoH, but I can't tell if anyone's even tried it yet.

No.

Think about these things:

1. You don't have to unpublish an arc to make major changes. Yes it is annoying to do major edits to live arcs but I have done serious overhauls to several of my arcs while they were still published, even going as far as adding/deleting entire missions in the process.
2. Nowhere does it say (and feel free to prove me wrong) that Aeon's challenge requires the submission to be a new arc written and published after his announcement.
3. If you don't win then you'll just regret throwing away all those ratings.

I think this is a personal decision that has to be up to you, but here's my 2 inf anyway.

If you are keeping the overall story and plot substantially the same, I would just edit the arc in place. (If you were throwing away the old story and replacing it with a completely different story, that would justify unpublishing & publishing a new arc. But I don't think you're doing that.)

Personally I've done substantial rewrites to Teen Phalanx Forever!, Flower Knight Task Force, Axis and Allies and Papers and Paychecks months after their original publication, mostly to make them better as a result of player feedback. All 4 of those were at 4 stars average, 100+ ratings, when I did the major revision.

I agree that there may be some early low ratings which wouldn't be justified any longer due to edits, but I don't think that's really that big a deal. I'd rather keep the arc id number the same, so if someone ran across a mention of the story arc in some very old forum review, or some other old message, they would still be able to find the arc.

Also, right now, I have a couple story arcs with a 4 star average, 200+ ratings, while I also have one story arc with a 5 star average and 7 ratings. While having a 5 star rating is definitely nice, personally, I feel the arcs with 200+ ratings have stood the test of time better than the arc with only 7 ratings, even though the latter technically has the higher star rating. (The default sorting order is flawed, IMHO. But that's another subject.)

When casting around the MA search tool looking for an arc to play, I'm more likely to try a 4-star arc with 100+ plays, than I am a 5-star arc with less than 10 plays; the one with 100+ plays is much more likely to be a polished story, while a 5-star rating with only 5 plays might just mean some buddies helped the author out. Neither arc is likely to be in the front 10 pages of the default search, so they're equally buried ... unless someone searches for "4 star arcs" (which a few people do), in which case a 4 star arc with 100+ ratings may jump out.

Anyway, I know other authors who feel the other way, and have unpublished and republished the same arc under a different arc ID several times to start with a "clean slate". So it's really a personal decision. But I hope that input helps you some.

I think it would be a folly to unpublish it but it is ultimately up to you.

Consider also that your low ratings for the earlier version of the arc aren't nearly as damaging to the overall rating as random drive-by 1-stars.

Thanks to everyone for the responses. I didn't expect it to so heavily fall on the "don't unpublish" side. I'm not convinced that is the best way to go. I really wish I knew what the exact rating of the arc was because that would make the decision very easy. In any case, at least for now I'm heavily modifying the existing arc.

WN

Oh, and I thought this was about the tricky decision of whether to work on the arc offline and having to resub, thus losing all plays, or working on the live version (and either:
- inevitably hit the 'bleed-through' bug at some time, thus having SOMEthing in your mission details reset. Which for me means, since I don't know what mission detail it was, I have to exit and reload, abandoning all changes, or
- saving constantly to an offline file, which means I am constantly kicked out of editing the published arc, and have to exit and re-open the editor, which is annoying and takes even longer if you don't want to run into the 'editing the old version' bug.
Or both.)

I don't think I'd resub if editing live wouldn't bother me. Only plus I can see are hypothetical people who check only new arcs and never look at those they already did, and hoping for an early rocket launch into the 5-star region. Which requires an awesome luck roll imo.

Ohhh I thought you meant there was a way to see your total plays including those that didn't rate your ARC.

Yeah I've seen that of course. I was looking around for some tiny number.