Vindicated!

In the last coffee talk Aeon said that he would have wanted to turn the stars ratings into "likes". I feel somewhat vindicated.

That would have certainly been nice. What particular talk was this mentioned in--what date? Where's it accessible?

What I don't understand about this (turning stars into likes) is why they didn't do it.

It doesn't sound like a complicated change, does it?

IMO, we should have had this years ago. If the devs ever do regain control of their game, I hope they can make this change right away.

(FWIW, I always tell people reviewing my arcs to either give 5 stars or none at all, which is basically the same thing.)

Well, Doc A said they decided it would take too much coding time to be possible. Parsing that can mean "it's really really complex, way more than you might think" or "we don't want to waste another pico-second on that %#@& if we don't have to."

I'm leaning towards the second interpretation. My guess is all the mess surrounding AE was seen as a distraction when they "should have been focusing on making more new stuff, not patching up this mess", so when they got it into some semblance of a stable configuration, they swore off it never to return.

I feel vindicated in stating that farming was NOT evil in this game. NCSoft's shuttering has nothing to do with the player preferences, obviously.

I would agree that that was what needed to be done, but unfortunately it would have been quite complex to do.
I still feel they should have done it though and then touted User Creatable Content as an important selling point of the game. Oh well.

It's effectively like an online shop or movie database where you are selecting the particular item you are interested in. You indicate your interest with like, dislike or favourite and it comes up with a recommended selection 'people who liked this item also liked ....'

Because lets face it, your not interested in an averaged result over all the customers that visited the site, your interested in what people with your likes and dislikes went and played.

So once you've found an arc that you like, the system should then guide you on through arc's of a similar style, regardless of whether that is story, challenging beat em ups, or farms.
You give all of your customers what they individually want.

Still it does sound that at least Dr Aeon realised what needed to be done, so perhaps as he works on games in future we will see the idea of User Creatable Content reemerge and implemented correctly next time.

Lets hope some good will come of this and hopefully I will be playing an user arc in some game in future and say 'hey this is damn good, wait a moment I recognise the style, I played their CoH arcs.'

Personally I prefer the star ratings to likes...but then, there's xkcd's take on it....