Please, devs, protect the authors

I can accept AE farming as a concept. Heck, I made a farm arc because I wanted to drive down the price of alchemical silver. But...

Can we get some dev care and concern for the problem of people 1-starring story arcs because they don't give amazing XP?

This is not a one-time thing. This is not a couple of times thing. This is a serious and recurring problem.

I would like to propose:

1. Any one-star ratings that show any signs of being thus motivated can be appealed and will be removed.
2. Remove the ability to rate arcs from players who do that. Possibly nuke their AE privs.

The problem here is not just that people are doing different things with MA; it's that the farmers and their players are now attacking the storytellers.

I am posting this partially because today's announcement of a new Dev's Choice gives me some tiny hope that the devs actually care about AE and mission arc writers.

Seriously. If you guys wanna one-star my stupid farm, please feel free. I would rate it one star if I played it on my other account, because it is uninteresting and serves no purpose other than to make alchemical silver quickly for a fire armor brute. But... I am not so okay with story arcs getting rated down because they aren't good farms. This is ridiculous.

If I had to choose between losing my stupid farm (and all the inf I got from it, and from silvers, and so on) and seeing authors get 1-star ratings for not producing farms, I would rather lose the loot.

When I came to this game, I genuinely though that "AE teams" were people roleplaying the AE arcs. I thought AE was the most amazing thing. I played @Twoflower's arcs, and some of @PW's, and @Bubbawheat's, and I thought "this is the coolest thing a video game has ever contained". The farmers are endangering that, and I think that's a problem. And yes, one-star ratings (in this rating system) do make it hard for me to find the stories I care about.

Speaking as someone who definitely wants AE to be a tool for storytelling...

I don't see how anything can be done.

Having the Devs judge what's a story that is worthy of protection is getting the devs in to subjective area that 1) is a dangerous precedent, and 2) would be time-consuming enough to be prohibitive.

And, perhaps more importantly, every player has the same right to vote, by whatever criteria they choose. Everybody pays the same sub fee every month (currently). If I could tell a player he can't 1-star for "not good enough a farm", then someone could tell me that I can't 1-star for atrociously poor spelling and grammar than hurts my eyes to read.

In the case where a clearly non-farm arc is downrated with a comment specifically about it being a poor farm? I do not think ncsoft would come out behind banning the handful of people who would do that.

I'm not talking about every case of someone giving a bad rating to any arc. I'm talking about people giving 1-star ratings for which the stated reasons are blatantly inappropriate.

Seriously, how many people are sending messages like "bad XP compared to other farms"? Not all that many, I'd guess, but I bet they're a BIG part of the rating hit real writing is taking due to the existence of farms.

(BTW, Bubbawheat: Ctrl+Alt+Reset was one of the first AE arcs I played, and I loved it.)

The system does not have enough participation to offset the actions of jerks, in either direction. Therefore it's not going to work, end of line.

They could do two things to alleviate this issue:

1. Require a player to actually play through the entire arc before they can rate it. That would eliminate the drive-by arc griefers.

2. Institute something like they do in sports competitions - throw away the low and high scores. Perhaps if they threw away the top and bottom 5% of the ratings, you could arrive at something approaching a true rating.

Quick brainstorming solution; why not just have it so that ratings given by people who haven't completed the arc are weighted into the average significantly lower than those who have? This would protect against both spite 1-starring and 5-star trading.

Having the ability to rate only on completion seems best. How many times have you had someone on your team play through your arc and forget/not get the chance to rate, but they were able to start it right back up and quit just to rate it favorably then? Yes, they've completed it, so they should be able to rate it whenever; otherwise, no dice.

Here we go again. We have presented many good solutions in the past that are being repeated again here. None of them matter at all if the devs do not speak up and let us know if this is considered an issue or not.

^^ I think its fairly obvious from how the iTrials have been built, the whole incarnate system in general, the Marketplace and now Freedom business model that the Devs are now _IN_ the farming business.

I was asked about this in beta chat today. I've got eight arcs out there including several DCs, so if anybody's getting piles of feedback to contribute as datapoints for this, it's me.

I rarely see "Somebody has rated your arc," which indicates a low star rating. (Not trying to brag, honestly, just pointing out I haven't seen a rash of one-stars.) In terms of feedback, I haven't seen a single "Bad XP" or "not a good farm" note.

The most common negative note I see is "too difficult," particularly on the Laser Moonbase which is, well, difficult since I didn't set the minimum level high enough to reasonably take on custom enemies. I guess that could mean "unrewarding" since repeated deaths cleave into rewards like an axe, or at least seem to.

Are other authors seeing a rash of 1-stars and negative reviews? Is this an actual problem out there?

I don't see a "rash of 1-stars" since the game won't tell us when we've been 1 or 2-starred if we're not logged in when it happens. I noticed because I happened to look at my published arcs and found that "Fear And Loathing On Striga" (play it now, 100 million inf to the vote that brings it back up to 5 stars) had been demoted to 4-star oblivion to make room for another farm on page 3.

I don't see negative comments either because the worthless asswipes who do these kinds of things are too lazy and cowardly to troll properly and prefer to hide behind the safety of anonymous downvoting. If someone actually had sent me a comment with their 1-star ratings I might have taken them serious.

The best fix for the ratings system is to replace it with a like/dislike system or just remove it entirely. Then simply count all plays, not just every player's first play. At least that would give a more accurate account of popularity. Farms would still hold the top 200 spots I suppose, but arcs created on day 1 and never unpublished might reach more than 100 plays if every single playthrough counted...

Agreed. These folks put themselves out there because they want to tell a story. It shouldnt be so easy to grief them for it.

At the very least, it shouldn't be possible to do it anonymously.

It would be nice if the Devs showed at least a bit of interest in AE beyond fixing farming exploits.

I've been wanting to write a sequel to one of my arcs. But lack of AE enhancements and no fix to the rating system - makes it hard to get motivated.

1-5 Star rating systems was never going to work very well, as anyone that remembers the days when we could star forum users. Over time a 3 star rating is the best anyone can expect. I was always surprised I managed to keep a 3 star rating

I would much rather see a pure "rep" system, like that used by some forum software. Where you only "rep" things positively and you cannot repeat rep the same author.

I would also like to be able to personally rate reviewers. This would mean all story reviews are public and you could potentially find reviewers with tastes that closely match your own.

Some rating systems use a system or individual "credit", these typically allow you to give something a negative rating but it impacts your own. Hopefully discouraging needless pointless negative comments and completely preventing people that exist just to 1 star.

I agree with Jagged. A Rep or a Like/Dislike system would be better than the "so many stars out of whatever" system.

Do you think there could be a lettering players could push out that would denote one type of AE from another.

For example in the title the first 2 letters would be SA-Fighting the Tide.

SA would denote Story Arch. Which means not a farm.

Or again I don't know if it is possible. Maybe to bring the point home go on a 1 star campaign and if you can 1 star all the devs choice AE missions to make it clear what the issue is. Heck just 1 star everything, everyone takes a hit.

Just like they removed the rating system on the forums because they seen what it did. Maybe showing them the how bad the system currently is flawed might fix this issue.

I should have the right to rate any arc on the criteria that I want to rate it on. If I want to 5 star every farm because, in my opinion, that is 5 star content than I will. Likewise, I should have the right to 1 star someone's 6 mission long arc with so much text wall my eyes go cross-eyed.

If an arc isn't to you liking and you want to 1-star it, that's within your right -- but the system right now brutally punishes authors for getting a single 1-star, since it's a slam to their rating that takes many 5-stars to recover from, as WN has endured.

The system itself is definitely broken, and it's something we've said to the devs since the earliest days of MA. It's too easy to rig, too easy to lose visibility, and rarely a good indicator of arc quality.

At this point, though, I don't know how willing the devs would be to replace it with something else. Momentum and lack of resources are a harsh pair; they've got bigger concerns right now than to dedicate considerable backend work to something that's become marginalized.

With Freedom coming up, hopefully there'll be a "vote with your dollars" effect. If enough people buy story slots and MA licenses, if we see more stories and more interest in playing those stories... it may show an overall increase in importance in AE, and in turn developer interest in revitalizing it.

And personally... I intend to plow onward with writing stories. I've finally got a chance to do more writing thanks to Freedom's buyable slots, and 1-stars or not, bad rating system or not, filter or not, I am going to write. That's what I can do on my end to help the health of the AE system.