Am I the only one feeling unmotivated....

I would argue that the intent of a ratings system like this one is to give the player some indication of an arc's quality, based on other players' opinions, so they can choose which arcs to play. The playerbase has stated that they overwhelmingly choose to play only 5-star arcs. If the rating system is a tool for authors, or people who have already played an arc, I would say there's no point to having it at all. If, on the other hand, it's a tool to point players toward arcs they might want to play, anything less than five stars effectively says "you don't really want to play this arc."

That depends. If the colleges are only looking at A students, and some teachers are handing out As to the D student who sucks up enough, and others are handing out grades entirely based on how they feel that day, then yes, I'd argue that the teacher who gives the B student an A grade might be justified. And grading students isn't nearly as subjective as rating arcs. And you or I can't just go waltzing into a school and start grading students.

A movie reviewer will also explain why they rated 4 stars. Moviegoers can read the review and judge whether they feel the reviewer is being overly harsh, and whether they agree with the reviewer's criteria. Arc reviews are the same. If Venture rates an arc 4 stars instead of 5 because of "weak theme," I would be more inclined to play it than an arc he rates 4 stars because of gameplay issues. But since we have no way of stating in-game why we rated the way we did, people who see our rating have no way of knowing if they agree with our criteria.

I reviewed over 150 arcs. Police Woman and Glazius have reviewed lots, there have been any number of less prolific contributors. PW went to the trouble of creating an "alternate Contact tree" for people looking to level through MA. Players have run their own contests involving MA.

Net effect: zip.

The community has held up its end here, gone the extra mile. Barring an extraordinary effort by the devs -- which may still have no effect -- this is it.

People have also gone into the general forums and promoted these resources at every available opportunity. General response? "I don't like those arcs." "AE doesn't get all the shiny gimmicks the devs use." "Why can't I use the base editor to create custom maps?" "It's all farms." Those last two made me facepalm the most, one because it shows that the poster obviously hasn't spent much time with the base editor and the other because I just linked to a whole freaking list of arcs that aren't farms.

The problem are the numbers involved, which is a side effect of the devs trying to make everyone an author, even though the odds that every player in the game should be an author are exactly zero, at least as it pertains to a general audience.

In the real world, usually about a dozen movies release in a week, from blockbusters to tiny indies. That many release in the AE every hour. Its impossible to view, review, or even browse them all.

The correct model, I think, for the AE isn't the film industry, its Youtube. Youtube releases content even faster than the AE, most of it is even crappier than what is in the AE. But they've figured out ways to manage that well enough to be usable. Sure, you can just search it, but imagine if the only think youtube had was search features that the AE had. It would be non-functional also. Youtube has channels where you can aggregate content, and playlists where you can see what other people are watching, and favorites so you can save lists of things you want to go back and see, and highlighted content to direct people to interesting things. It doesn't present you with a list of all fifty billion videos in it and offer to sort it by date or alphabetical order. That would be ludicrous.

The devs need to decide what the AE is supposed to be. If its supposed to be a source of content players want to play, the focus has to be on the consumers of content, not the generators of it. Or rather, the focus should be on the generators of content when it comes to content creation, but then on the consumers of content when it comes to content vetting.

I'm going to be blunt here. The authors deserve the best tools we can give them to write AE arcs, and I think there's tons of room for improvement there. And those tools need to be first class tools not second class tools, by which I mean the devs would never just randomly change how existing content works, and break seven years of writer effort for standard content. They have no problem doing that for the AE. That has to stop, period. Up to this point, we need to treat the people willing to put time into writing for the AE as valuable assets, and give them the support they need to write the best content possible.

But once the authors are given those tools, they are on their own. We shouldn't care about them one tiny bit. Screw them, in fact. If the players want a top 100 list of arcs, then the guy that wrote the 101st best arc is screwed. Too bad. If the players think his arc sucks, that information should be available for all to see. Author doesn't like it, author can grow thicker skin, or write better, or take ball and go home. I don't care either way. If there are too many arcs and players can't sort through them all, then we increase the thresholds necessary to show up in search lists. Authors don't like it? Too bad. On the consumer side, I don't care that the system is "fair" to authors. I don't care if all good content is played. I care that all played content is good.

The devs need to understand that the priority for the *tools* is the authors, but the priority for the *system* is the players. I honestly believe *one* of the restraints on the devs in terms of trying to make a better AE system for presenting quality content to the players is they are afraid of hurting the feelings of the authors. They shouldn't be. And I agree with Venture about one thing: the devs broke it, the devs have to fix it. The players alone cannot override the huge cultural inertia surrounding the AE at this point.

What I've said from the beginning is that my metric for success for the AE is this: 50 people writing, 50000 people playing is a massive success. 50000 people writing, 50 people playing is an epic failure. I think everyone should have the right to make an arc, upload it, and give their friends the arc ID number so they can play it. I do not believe everyone has the right to have their arc presented to a mass audience. That's a privilege that has to be vetted somehow, and an imperfect way of doing so is better than no way. What that imperfect way should be is a different debate, but the one thing I don't think that imperfect way requires is absolute fairness. It must generate good content first. It should then be as fair as it can be second. A very distant second.

In I14 beta, when I expressed something along these lines, I was told by some that it wasn't fair for me personally to express this idea because it was self-serving: Arcanaville could get people to play arcs by simply asking, whereas the average random player wouldn't have the same opportunity. After very careful consideration, I've decided that I no longer believe this to be a valid objection. Not because its not true, but because its irrelevant.

I've had a few pretty funny comments from people playing Astoria in D Minor criticizing me for the map design and enemy powers (as in the ones the Banished Pantheon use). Sometimes people just have zero interest in the arc building process so they don't really know what can and can't be done, and just assume that architects have the same sort of power over their arcs that devs do.

Astoria in D Minor, a horror arc. Arc ID: 41565 - The Beating Heart of Astoria: A Play in Five Acts. Arc ID: 170547 - Ignition of the Machine, a story with robots. Arc ID: 318983
Captain Skylark Shadowfancy and the Tomorrownauts of Today. Arc ID: 337333 - Signal:Noise, where is everybody? Arc ID: 341194
@The Cheshire Cat - Isn't it enough to know I ruined a pony making a gift for you?

12 second horror stories - a writing experiment.

If this message were a story arc, I would give it 5 stars.

I think you may be misunderstanding the motivation of people who use ratings to improve an arc's standing in the search tool. The only reason to do that (at least, the only reason I do that) is because the search tool is currently the only way to tell the playerbase at large which arcs you feel are worth playing...which is what the ratings system is supposed to do, but doesn't, unless you game it.

I agree with everything you said, but there is a problem with this part. Arcanaville can get people to play arcs by simply asking because she's Arcanaville. I'm not saying you're a bad author, but I don't know if you're a good one either. I do know you are well-known and a lot of people are willing to listen to what you have to say. Now granted, PoliceWoman can also get people to play arcs by simply asking, because PoliceWoman has established a reputation as a good author. See the difference? One is based on unrelated popularity, the other is based on a reputation built up through AE itself.

Now, given time, I'm sure problems like that would sort themselves out, but the Neuron-like attention span of the playerbase at large wouldn't give it the time.

As I said, I'm not arguing with whether its true or not, but rather if its relevant. I acknowledge the objection is technically true on some level, but I believe no one should care.

If people want to play my arcs, then the AE should make them easy to find if the AE cares about what players want, rather than what's fair to authors. Why players want to run my arcs is irrelevant, because players should not have to justify why they want what they want.

Once you start saying the AE should go out of its way to "level" the playing field between me and someone else, you immediately fall victim to the trap of thinking its more important to care if an author doesn't like the fact that I can get more plays than they do, than that players like what they play.

Fundamentally, ratings and review are reputation systems. People trust them if they have a reputation for being useful. A properly working system will include a way for players to decide what information is credible and what information is not credible, whether its Venture's reviews or someone else's walk throughs or a posting on the forums. Or my presumed reputation for not being illiterate and knowing which end of the Master Illusionist is supposed to point upward. The players have to judge for themselves. As I said during I14 beta, I would spend at least one year staying away from this subject as it pertained to myself personally. The year is long up, and observationally speaking I don't think I have any specific advantage in attracting players over any other "name" on the forums. All of us do have an advantage over a random unknown player. But no reputation based review system can eliminate the property that notoriety factors into reputation, one way or the other.

To put it another way, ratings and reviews require reputation, and reputation requires non-anonymity (at least as in-game identities go). If the author is anonymous, and the reviewers are anonymous, no one can know whether to trust the author or the reviewer. Once someone knows the author or reviewer is Eva or Arcana, the player must be allowed to decide if that author or reviewer can be trusted on their own or if they are willing to take a chance on that author or review or not. To take that right away from the player is intrinsicly incorrect in my opinion.

Yeah, its self-serving to a certain degree. But I think that's coincidental. Of course, people have to decide by reputation whether I can make a self-serving assertion without conflict of interest.

The youtube comparison is pretty much it, yeah.

As you've mentioned before, and I've noted to other folks, establishing the value of arcs should be done by word of mouth first. If you produce something worth playing, your initial testers -- be they friends, SG mates, or just some adventurous folks you found on global -- will want to share it with other people. Who, if they enjoy it, will want to share it with others.

From there, the system can note patterns in who upvotes (or downvotes) what arcs, and it's easy to track trends (arc Y tends to also be upvoted by people who like arc Z, but tends to be downvoted by people who like arc Q), enabling actual suggestions based on what people play through and up or downvote.

Trying to pin specific star ratings on arcs as if the discrete numbers matter is pointless, because nobody is working on the same scale, and there's no way for the system to figure out what particular players mean when they use 3 star here, 4 star there, and five star here so that it can normalize them.

When it comes to looking at an arc's history, I think the things that need to be tracked are how many people have tried it total, how many people have played it to completion, how many people took the time to upvote it, how many people took the time to downvote it.

...this is all separate from the matter of a properly working search tool, of course.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Softcapping an Invuln is fantastic. Softcapping a Willpower is amazing. Softcapping SR is kissing your sister.

It's more important to expose players to content they might like, than to expose them to content by people who are well-liked. Like I said, it would even itself out over time, since the majority of the game population doesn't know who the hell you or I or PoliceWoman or Venture are, and doesn't care.

It's mostly an implementation problem, since over time authors and reviewers would establish a reputation that is actually relevant to AE. I am reminded of a post made in regard to the removal of Dev's Choice badges. Someone argued that he'd spent years organizing community events, helping players out, and being active in his server's community, he should get something for it. What the hell does any of that have to do with AE? You could tell me how long my Scrapper can stand in the middle of a mob of Rikti without dying down to the milisecond, but what the hell does that have to do with AE?

Now if we were to start everything over from scratch today, then yes, we could probably establish quite a decent sorting order based on people's actual AE accomplishments rather than a general popularity contest. That is, assuming we could get enough people to care.

Honestly, I'm just using you as an example of someone who is well-known and would have had a massive advantage based on accomplishments that aren't relevant to AE. If literacy and a basic understanding of game balance is the requirement to write an arc, we're in trouble. If the ability to get your name mentioned in DPS calculations in the Scrapper forums is a requirement, we're equally in trouble. I don't mean to imply that your interest is self-serving, because it's great in theory, but, well, people are stupid.

You get shards in Dev's Choice missions, which is why it bugs me so much that there haven't been any in so long. Most of my 50s are out of non-repeatable contacts and there are only so many tips.

Since there are so few Dev Choice missions, the fact that the AE can drop shards from them is really only relevant for people who don't care about new stories, which means they'd probably rather be farming the same canon mission instead.

Yes, but if there were new ones, people could get shards doing new stuff.

Yes, I was just explaining my thought process when I posted the original comment that you replied to. I know that you get shards in them, but it's irrelevant because they've been abandoned.

The interesting question is where to draw the line. I'd say my knowledge of the powers system and game balance is a reasonable thing to judge whether I can make arcs that target a particular difficulty level, whether I can make interesting combat situations, whether I can accommodate a particular range of playstyles. It doesn't *prove* I can do that, but its a reasonable thing upon which to take a gamble.

Conversely, if someone decides to play one of Venture's arcs because they find his reviews interesting, is that an accomplishment "relevant" to the AE that is more relevant than my functional game knowledge? Does being able to review an arc mean someone can write one?

How do you decide what is relevant to whether an author is more or less likely to create a well-written and well-designed AE arc? Or, to put it in more specific terms, how much of a penalty would you be willing to assess to me to compensate for the advantage you think I have?

Here's something to ponder. Suppose someone were to say that they were willing to give my arcs a try because they like reading my posts. That's all. Would you consider that an unfair, irrelevant factor upon which to base playing choice that I need to be prevented from benefiting from? Suppose someone were to say that they were *not* willing to give my arcs a try because they don't like reading my posts. Would you consider that an unfair, irrelevant factor upon which to base playing choice that I need to be protected from?

You're phrasing things in an odd way. I did not specify a requirement for writing arcs. There is no such requirement currently or embedded anywhere in my post. I said people should be left to decide for themselves under what circumstances they will play an arc. You're saying if they choose to do so because they recognize my name that's unfair to people with less name recognition. I'm saying I agree: its not fair. I'm saying I don't care. And the reason why I don't care is that I've come to the conclusion that deciding for the players on what basis they will get to choose which arcs to play is intrinsicly wrong. If they want to pick mission arcs based on which author is taller that is their right. That is unfair to short authors. I still don't care.

The requirement on authors is not literacy or knowledge of game mechanics or the ability to add. Its writing what other people want to play. Nothing else matters. Nothing else should matter. The "best" arcs shouldn't be played, the arcs people want to play should be played. This is not a game design school.

It is within that context that it is up to the devs to set the ground rules. People don't get to play PL exploitive farms just because they want to. They don't get to play arcs that somehow violate the terms of service. The devs decide what is out of bounds. Everything else is then inbounds, and the players choose what of what's left they want to play. Its the only way to ultimately get them *to* play.


Here's something ironic. Just *thinking* about this thread has increased my motivation to write arcs again. I've been playing around with the AE recently, but thinking about the fundamentals of the AE system has me wondering once again if it can be a successful story telling medium. Just one month ago I was saying how the collective non-stop patch-breaking of my one real story arc after I14 release all but turned me off of writing actual stories within the AE. This, plus a lot of other things to be sure, has me thinking it might be time to blow the dust off of old story ideas.

Yes, I fully agree that your extensive knowledge of game mechanics would imply that you are capable of providing an interesting and balanced game experience, which is important. It does not prove you can tell a good story, which is also important.

You are also implying though, that people should get to decide what other people get to play, which is where I disagree. This is the part where a majority of shiny-chasers with the attention span of a ferret on Red Bull decide that single-mission meta-humor gets to be played and people looking for actual well-written stories are right back to "I can't find anything good."

Now if that sounds elitist, well it is. I have very little faith in the majority of the player base's ability to discern half-decent writing from a hole in their head right now.

You seem to be deliberately angling for an argument here, where none exists. I don't see what you're trying to imply, except that players may make decisions on what to play based on incomplete information. The average player knows exactly nothing about you or me to start. If all one player knows about me is that I have some knowledge about how the game works and they know exactly zero about you, why is it inappropriate for someone to elect to try my arcs before yours or anyone else's that they know absolutely nothing about?


If I recommend an arc, and people play it based on that recommendation, I did not decide for them what to play. They decided to follow or ignore my recommendation. To believe otherwise is to say that the players are mindless sheep, and we should then stop bothering to discuss the matter because its totally hopeless. We're wasting our time even contemplating ways to improve the situation, because such a situation is intrinsicly impossible to improve. The only question becomes *who* gets to manipulate the sheep, and to what end. Even if you get them to magically play "the best" arcs in "a fair" way it will only be because they are following your plan like automatons. Which is a farce.

I can only consider providing ways for players to make up their own minds, to the extent that they can legitimately make up their own minds. To the extent they cannot be trusted to make up their own minds in the way we want them to a remedy for that is social engineering beyond my current pay grade.


But that is my point. If the AE is to be targeted at players and not authors, its goal should not be to make "high quality" arcs. It should be to make entertaining arcs. The playerbase may have no ability to judge what a "well written" arc is, but that is not their job. Their task is to find AE arcs that they enjoy playing, to encourage them to play more. The authors' job is to make such arcs. The fact that you don't think its your job to write arcs other people will conclude on their own are entertaining is, in fact, part of what I believe the problem with the AE is. Authors deciding what other authors' writing goals should be. If authors' goals are to impress other AE authors with their script-writing skills because the unwashed masses can't appreciate their work, the AE has failed in truly fundamental way.

You said earlier that while understanding game mechanics is potentially important, being able to tell a good story is also important. I content that the most important thing is to be entertaining, as judged by the players of this game. By definition, that means the players as a whole cannot be wrong. If they think you suck, its because you suck, at least at making City of Heroes content. You might be great at making other content, targeted at other people, in other contexts. But you'd be an AE failure, because the players said so.

I'm actually looking at it as a player here, not an author. The front pages of the search engine are full of what other people seem to think I should play. I know what other people seem to find entertaining. I'm not entertained. If only "the best of the best" should be showcased, then my pickings are going to be slim. One of the beauties of player-created content is that catering to a niche doesn't use up valuable development time, all it takes is one person to say "I want to write an arc for people who actually like to fight Malta" or "I want to write an arc for people who like Stupid Scrapper Tricks" or "I want to write an arc for fans of some obscure anime Eva's never heard of" and bam, those 100 or 5 or however many people have some content targeted at them. A system that essentially decides who should be a "published" author and who shouldn't based on mass appeal completely misses that opportunity.

Unless I'm completely misunderstanding your proposal here, which is entirely possible.

I'm glad you brought this up because now I get a guilt-free ride on my hobby horse. YouTube also no longer uses star ratings, because they are counterproductive when aggregating mass opinion. See link in sig.

As a person who is leveling a character from 1-20 in AE for idiosyncratic reasons, I can attest that the AE system is downright inimical to players. It'd be even more inimical if I didn't know about the wholly player-created, undocumented content text tags (SFMA/LFMA in particular). I've argued before and will argue again essentially Arcanaville's point, and will add that when updates break existing arcs this is not only bad for authors, but also for players and for the AE system itself. HoF/DC arcs are supposed to be representative of the best AE has to offer, but ironically this status makes them more likely to be broken permanently. That is dumb.

While I agree that is a short sighted design flaw, equally short sighted is the lack of at least monthly new DCs and a reevaluation of HoF. This oversight is absolutely having a negative effect on MA authors and players.

I still get people asking me for sequels to my arcs or just new arcs, but even though I had started work on another "The Golden Age Secret to the Paragon Society" arc (you get to fight along side the original members through the decades) I stopped work on it since I know I'm never going to be able to publish it.

Despite being a very visible long time promoter/supporter of all things MA, despite the arc being listed over a dozen times in all three the "Suggestions for DC" thread, despite it winning Best Heroic Arc of 2010. despite the arc being rated at 5 stars since the day it was published, now with over 300 plays, plus many extremely positive reviews on the forums, not a single developer has taken the less than an hour it would take to play it. To me, this is a clear message that MA, like bases and to a lesser extent pvp is in the "very low priority" bin for the devs. It's sad and I wish it was not the case, but it seems pretty clear to be the case. Color me totally disappointed.

I know that the issues with HoF not being addressed and the lack of new DCs can be seen as my personal frustration. However the fact that there is currently a farm in HoF and page 4 is almost 50% arcs with names with "farm and PL" in them can not be dismissed as easily and they are another indicator of total lack of caring by the powers that be.



WN

I'm not sure that's what she's implying. I think it's the logical conclusion that those kinds of arcs will get the most plays in a Youtube system, yes, but meanwhile, those of us that want well written stories would have a means for finding them due to features like favorites lists and channels.

You, Bubbawheat, Police Woman, and others would have favorites lists. Also (I don't know if this is how Youtube channels work, but MA channels should work like this) you all could collectively have a channel and invite other players to it that seem like-minded, and together everyone could post arcs that they like in-game, instead of on the forums where far less players are aware of your lists.

I don't know about you, but I never click links on Youtube's home page. Yet I still find Youtube to be extremely beneficial because I can find good content that other people have recommended (usually through other sources outside of the website, but if I wanted to specifically look for regular youtube content, I'd use the tools it has). Yes, this does require someone to find that content in the first place, but as an author, if I know about your list, and know that you like the kind of arcs I write, I can send you a message and ask you to try my arc. There won't be any pressure to "5 star" it, because all that matters is if you like it enough to put it on your list. If it's not good enough for you to put on the list, I know you aren't going to feel pressured to do so anyway, because you care about the quality of the content on your list more than one stranger's feelings. Putting crap on your list would result in less people playing arcs on your list, harming more people than the authors of the crap in the long run.

Yes, the system would still be loaded with farms and other stuff we don't want to play, but we'd have good mechanisms for finding what we wanted.

I didn't make a specific proposal per se, except to say that I believe the movie rating star system isn't the appropriate model in my opinion; the more multi-dimensional Youtube model for organizing and promoting content is the better model given the numbers involved.

The part of my post we've been discussing is however the details of such a model are formulated, what should its priorities be. And in my opinion, those priorities should be to present content to players that they actually want to play.

Which is a problem with the star system itself, which we all agree is problematic, in no small part because its one-dimensional, and the search bubbles aren't really a good way to alter that on their own. That means the current system fails for you as a player to deliver content you enjoy. But my point is that a *working* system should be more concerned with presenting content you will enjoy, rather than presenting all the authors wanting to target you. If a hundred authors are actually targeting you with content (by coincidence), its more important that the system present 50 of those arcs to you even if it misses the other 50, than be certain to present all one hundred if its also going to present a thousand other people's arcs to you at the same time.

Now, that is an oversimplification. The Youtube model might suggest this, at least when it came to global searches: there are hundreds of thousands of arcs. Thousands of them might be something you like. We can't present them all to you simultaneously. What we should do is take a reasonable guess as to what you want based on some input from you, and show you a small set of those. We can show a random subset of those every time you ask, so you will get different ones every time, or a weighted version looking for the best matches that will show the closest match every time. On top of that, assuming we guess wrong, we will also show you some related content and see if it catches your eye. Then we will let you explore the system by picking what you want to play, and as you do we will continue to try to show you related content. But always a small number of options at a time, so you are not overwhelmed.

Note that the Youtube model doesn't discriminate, but its also not fair. Which is to say, snowball effects can occur. Random chance can present an arc to players slightly more often, which grants it slightly more plays, which then causes it to show up higher in more searches, which eventually causes it to get increasingly more plays. That just means that authors won the lottery. The other authors that didn't? I don't care. Random chance alone cannot accelerate plays: the arc also has to be good enough that it gets reviewed positively, or the extra attention only causes it to eventually be played *less* often. The system doesn't find the best arcs, it finds the good enough ones and the bad enough ones and starts amplifying the difference between the two so players can distinguish between them.

Which sort of gets back to my original post. The reason why I believe there is no way for players to post comments about an arc that everyone else can see is that the devs are concerned about players griefing authors. That is a definite possibility. Its just that I believe its a possibility we have to stop caring about. Right now, in a very real sense, the AE griefs players by throwing the kitchen sink at them and sapping their entertainment in many if not most cases. And that's what I mean when I say when it comes to the presentation side of the AE, we should care about players and stop caring completely about authors, except for extreme circumstances. "This arc sucks, no one should play it because the author can't spell and the plot makes no sense" is not an extreme case. That's life. I would only protect authors from petitionable actions.

I was actually thinking of something I would more accurately call a review list. It would be a list of all arcs I decided to review and publish onto that list (it would not automatically place all arcs I review onto that list: you could review things pseudo-anonymously if you wanted to). That list would be the in-game version of what happens on the forums: people play the arc, write a review (it would have to be a generally shorter one, but could link to a deeper review out of game in some way) and maybe post an overall grade. This grade would only be useful to sort the arcs within that one list or reviewer. My four star arcs would NEVER, EVER find themselves on a list with Venture's four star arcs in a global search, because those ratings would be specific to a single reviewer. Which reflects a fundamental truth: no one's ratings are precisely, or sometimes even remotely, comparable to another reviewer.

But you could use them to sort all the arcs I've reviewed based on *my* personal assessment of their quality. However, for all of these arcs you'd also see my review. And it brings up an interesting possibility the current system really doesn't allow for. I could review an arc and give it one star, and then in my review say this arc is so hilariously bad I'm actually recommending people play it because it is so hilariously bad, just to witness the sheer awesome level of bad. Someone who subscribed to my review channel could read that, decide that's not for them, and pass. Someone else could decide they were bored that day, and play the arc looking for something weird. You can try to do that now by playing 1-star arcs, but the vast majority of 1-star arcs are bad in uninteresting ways, if they are even all that bad.

The stars are meaningful here because unless I'm an AE playing machine, my list might have thirty arcs in it, maybe fifty, maybe a hundred? I could only be adding a few a day or a week, if that. So my entire list fits within the limits of human attention span. Anyone following it deliberately does have the time to read the reviews or summaries to know *why* I rated it what I did. They may even explicitly want to know why I rated it what I did, because that is the actual *reason* for subscribing to my review channel. And that allows the rating stars to suddenly have meaning again. It means something because people who get to know me through my reviews learn what my stars mean, just like they do for any forum reviewer. They are not portable, but they are a useful data point within a single reviewer space. They could actually *encourage* players to investigate the arc more deeply by reading the review, whereas right now they do basically the opposite.


A superchannel of multiple players is an interesting notion. I'd want to think about the mechanics of how such a thing would best work. I'm not sure if the best way is to literally create a list everyone could post to. Managing that forces the creation of channel authorities, and those have issues that might be more trouble than they are worth in the AE specifically.