Please, devs, protect the authors

Pull your head out of your ***. Do yourself a favour and figure out what a thread is about before you post in it.

If you have any reading comprehension whatsoever, you would understand that I dont actually write arcs and it is impossible to harrass me in this way.

Having the balls to leave a comment when you are trolling someone is one thing, targeting a group of vocal ae writers in a systematic way to lower their rating just because it can be done anonymously is harrasment.

I dont care what happens to the rating system. I dont use it. Its bollocks, and means nothing to me. I do care that a group of people are being targeted and harrased. The op in this thread is asking for that to stop. I dont think that is an unreasonable request and shared my idea on how to curb it. There have been other good ideas in this thread as well.

Take away the anonymity and it will bring some accountability is all I am saying. Nothing more, nothing less.

Of course not. If I did, I would think you are harrassing me rather than just being an idiot.

Its clear the OP wants to nuke people from playing AE if they don't like the XP given by a particular arc and rate it 1-star accordingly.

To which you replied out of thin air:

So where's the lack of reading comprehension? Oh I see....in your opinion. I get it. You are the right one here, everyone else is wrong. Nice try again hiding your obvious arrogance.

You really do believe that 1-star opinions constitute griefing. Good thing we have devs with brains and not you in charge.

This is... Not right.

If someone one-stars a farm for giving poor XP, that is fine by me. What I don't like is seeing people go out of their way to judge an arc as something it wasn't intended as.

Imagine that the game let you "rate" power sets. What we're seeing here is a bunch of people who play blasters going through rating every tanker primary, scrapper or brute secondary, 1 star because "it does crappy damage". And that makes the rating system useless for the designed purpose.

The intended purpose of the rating system is to make it easy for players to find "good" arcs. Since different people are looking for completely unrelated things, it is pretty likely that some arcs are well-done and of high quality, but not interesting to me. Instead of rating them one star for being stupid, I ignore them because they're not what I'm looking for.

I would say that they can. Griefing is all about attitude and intent. Griefing is "things done with intent to cause other players grief". The current rating/search system does not provide good tools for players who have different interests; you can sort of cover this a bit by using informal tags (such as SFMA), but the net result is that people are trying to wreck the scores of other peoples' arcs, not because they think the arc is bad writing, but because they don't want other people to be able to play the game differently.

For all I know, this was started by story fans who were one-starring farm arcs. Or maybe it was started by farmers. I don't know. I don't much care, either. The reason I framed this in terms of story arcs is simple: It's not hard to find farms, and they're by nature interchangeable. No one cares what the skins are on the lovingly-crafted things that do only fire damage. Story arcs, however, are not interchangeable, and making it hard to find good story arcs hurts both the writers and the players who enjoy stories.

With all due respect, since this is your thread....how are you capable of proving "intent?"

The answer is...you can't. You have no idea why someone ranked something 1-star UNLESS THEY TELL YOU. Now in that case, they can use the comment form and TELL you why and in those situations, its NOT an anonymous system...you get their global ID. That happened here already and people quickly came online, started recommeding that that player be petitioned for griefing. They created a posse for them for having the audacity of ranking an arc with 1-star (their right) and giving their reason (their right).

How is using the system as intended griefing? Its not. It hurt someones feelings and they now want to string up anyone else that ranks an arc poorly as "proof of intent to grief." It could be the gospel truth....they took the arc, did play it and ranked it that way. They took the arc, read the mission briefing and decided "This is stupid, I don't want to play this" and ranked it purely on the mission briefing. They could have even mis-clicked the rating they intended for all you know. The reality is you can't prove intent. You can guess, but that's all you can do.

Be careful when you attempt to pass judgement on the intent of others. That's a very, very slippery slope. Unless you are a mind-reader, you don't have a clue why they did it. But merely doing it isn't griefing. That's how the system currently works.

If I wanted to play the "whats your intent" game here, I'd say that your intent with this thread, like so many others, is to make a case that the playstyle rights and preferences of AE authors are somehow superior to those of other players, worthy of needing protected class status. I'm sure that's NOT what you are saying, but that could easily be the interpreted "intent" of your message.

I can't, obviously, but sometimes people helpfully state their intent.

I started this thread because I know multiple authors who have gotten comments which specifically bashed non-farm mission arcs for not being farms.

(Note: All the stuff about whether or not ratings or comments are "anonymous" is uninteresting to me; I don't consider that a significant factor. You can argue that with people who care about it, if you wish.)

Okay, tell you what.

When a redname comes here and says "we specifically anticipated and intended that players would use the rating system to one-star arcs that were not designed to exploit the AE system in order to yield disproportionate rewards", I will concede that you are right, and the ratings in question are "using the system as intended".

Until that happens, I will go with the more reasonable assumption that the rating system was not intended to be used to penalize people for not creating farms.

Fixing it is easy: eliminate rewards. People just don't want to accept that.

Because if they did that even fewer people would play arcs, to the point where there would be so few players the system might as well not exist. You don't want to accept that.

You could fix it that way, but... you ever seen the Stephen King film, The Langoliers?, thats how AE would look.

We're already there.

Plenty of people play AE arcs, but they don't stray past the first page. Ask me, ask PW, it's not an earthshattering amount. But I get well over a couple dozen plays per week from new players.

But story arcs are pretty easy to find. You just have to search for Dev's Choice and bam! there's a whole bunch of them waiting for you.

¬_¬

In order to get a DC someone, usually more than one someone, needs to play the arc and recommend it for DC in the first place.


WN

But with all the "forum posters playing each others arcs and recommending them to the devs" that goes on, there's really no need for anyone else to play those arcs for that purpose, is there?

The point, at least for me, is to have as many people enjoy them as possible. Since I have no control over DC and it's totally subjective anyways, the rating system, though very broken, matters for now.


WN

Misunderstanding the burden of proof 101.

Most of the best story arcs I've played have not been dev's choice.

I bounce around the search, often choosing missions that have zero plays. But I try to hit various ratings and high/medium/low number of plays. I also keep a log of those missions I enjoyed, so I can go back to them again on another character later or with my family when we're running together (I'm often the initial play tester to find said arcs ).

This forum is invaluable for finding arcs as well. Many thanks to those who have taken the time to discuss and list arcs they enjoy.

Yes

Certainly, you have the right to rate a bad arc as bad but MUST you? I guess some people feel the "burden" of protecting others from what they perceive as bad but they could just let it go and move on.

Separating farm arcs from story arcs would do one thing really well: make targeting either one much easier for those who have nothing better to do than grief someone they don't happen to agree with.

So rather than showing a mean score, why not simply show a median score?

When one person goes after ALL the arcs of a few global names, gives them all one star, and leaves the same message "Gave bad XP compared to other farms", the intent is fairly clear. People are getting trolled.

The SAME message. By the SAME person. To the SAME person's arcs. Within a short period of time. That targeted rating-bombing.

You're being remarkably obtuse... almost as obtuse as someone playing story-arcs and supposedly thinking they're supposed to be farms... and HEY GUYS, i think we just found our one-star bandit!