[Mobius]

Depends. I'm not a big fan of talking characters and character-driven situations (with all their implications... I prefer to do things the way). I appreciate all the great effort devoted to create BP, but that saga does not match my style. That's why I like variety and would love to see completely new stuff, like Wings of Dawn.

[Snail]

...but Wings of Dawn is an even greater departure from ...

[Mobius]

It's something original. I like the concept behind its creation and the fact that it's a solo man work.

[Black Wolf]

You know, if we had a rating bar on the wiki, we'd be able to answer this question definitively...


Just sayin...

No.

In fact this thread is a great example of why it wouldn't work.

I respectfully disagree. In fact, this thread is a great example of why such a feature would be useful.

[General Battuta]

It's something original. I like the concept behind its creation and the fact that it's a solo man work.

So was BP! And Wings of Dawn has talking characters who drive the plot, just like BP! And now Wings of Dawn has grown into a team effort, just like BP!

This thread is going stupid places. Let's not do this.

You know, if we had a rating bar on the wiki, we'd be able to answer this question definitively...


Just sayin...

No.

In fact this thread is a great example of why it wouldn't work.

I respectfully disagree. In fact, this thread is a great example of why such a feature would be useful.

You've already got a zillion votes for BP, butthurt over people who would downvote BP because it's 'not their style', and squabbling over whether Second Great War Part II should or shouldn't be recommended.

[Mobius]

I respectfully disagree. In fact, this thread is a great example of why such a feature would be useful.

But you'd still have all those issues related to tastes.

What about introducing a rating bar focusing on exclusive content (such as new ships, effects, etc.) and gameplay (absence of bugs)?

So was BP! And Wings of Dawn has talking characters who drive the plot, just like BP! And now Wings of Dawn has grown into a team effort, just like BP!

This thread is going stupid places. Let's not do this.

But BP takes place in the FS2 Universe. That prevented its character-driven nature from matching my personal tastes.

[General Battuta]

It takes place in the BP universe. It is its own story.

What about introducing a rating bar focusing on exclusive content (such as new ships, effects, etc.) and gameplay (absence of bugs)?

This is what I'd support. A rating bar for individual assets. (Not exclusive content, that's bull****.) But ratings on a model page, that's a good idea.

[Black Wolf]

You've already got a zillion votes for BP, butthurt over people who would downvote BP because it's 'not their style', and squabbling over whether Second Great War Part II should or shouldn't be recommended.

If BP has a zillion votes, it'd get upvoted on the wiki. If it got downvoted, I like to think that our community is mature enough that people would recognize it as an excellent campaign, and knock a few points off for being out of their personal style. So maybe it'd get 90% instead of 95%. For that matter, downvoting something because it's not in your preferred style is perfectly legitimate, IMO. It's a personal rating.
"I personally enjoyed this campaign this much, My vote is of equal value to the dozen others who voted for it. They all enjoyed it that much. The average is the consensus of the community." If you accept that peoples motivations are all equally relevamt (and you should) then what, exactly, is wrong with that?

And as for 2GWP2, if you go and look at its wiki page, you'll see a clear description of what it is in the comments section, so even if by some confluence of people who think it's funny to vote it at 100%, people would know what they were getting into before they downloaded it.

And look at the rest of the thread - people throwing out the names of campaigns they have enjoyed. A rating system would be exactly the same, except quantified, and easy to access via the campaign list on the wiki.

[Black Wolf]

What about introducing a rating bar focusing on exclusive content (such as new ships, effects, etc.) and gameplay (absence of bugs)?

The script doesn't work that way I'm afraid. You get one rating bar per page. A bar for mods (i.e. new ships) is almost certainly going to be going ahead, but at the moment a bar for campaigns is what's contentious.

[EDIT]Apologies for the double post, thread is moving too quickly.

[General Battuta]

It would add the objective, indisputable element of an aggregate score. Getting a high score would become an objective: witness IRL game studios that use Metacritic scores as targets. Projects would be incentivized to boost this score with advertising, personal favors, withholding assets and help, and undercutting competitors.

Any ranking is by nature zero-sum. Moving any given campaign up a notch requires taking another down a notch. This is not a zero-sum community; we are all in this together. We don't need a ranking system that splits people.

If you want to have general tiers - 'high quality', 'mid quality', 'low quality', and vote campaigns into that, fine. But nothing more discrete.

[Mobius]

Uhm, I'm a bit skeptic on the way campaigns should be rated. I'm totally against a binary vote (I like it - I don't like it) because it wouldn't do justice to a great many campaigns and, more importantly, it would be extremely inaccurate.

Votes ranging from 0 to 10 are also a bit inaccurate IMHO, as people tend to give 10s and 0s out the n00bish way without caring too much about the consequences. Any alternatives?

[General Battuta]

Yes: we don't do it at all. The installer already supplies a pretty good spread focused mostly on high-quality stuff.

[Mobius]

And let many good campaigns disappear?

[Black Wolf]

It would add the objective, indisputable element of an aggregate score. Getting a high score would become an objective: witness IRL game studios that use Metacritic scores as targets. Projects would be incentivized to boost this score with advertising, personal favors, withholding assets and help, and undercutting competitors.

Any ranking is by nature zero-sum. Moving any given campaign up a notch requires taking another down a notch. This is not a zero-sum community; we are all in this together. We don't need a ranking system that splits people.

If you want to have general tiers - 'high quality', 'mid quality', 'low quality', and vote campaigns into that, fine. But nothing more discrete.

The script doesn't give you general tiers, just a number out of 100. And ranking isn't neccesary - it can be implemented as a guage on the individual campaign page and then referenced in a new column on Narwhal's Campaign List. And frankly, I don't see how an indisputable, objective score is a bad thing. Sure, campaigns are going to be subjectively judged by everyone indivdually, but a good campaign will get a good score, and a mediocre campaign will get a mediocre score. I can;t imagine anyone looking at acampaign with a score of 89 and saying "Well, I'm not playing that! It's under 90!", but I can definitely imagine someone skipping over a few campaigns with ratings of 40 or 50% - and really, if something has a rating of that low, it probably deserves it for more than subjective issues - it's probably buggy and poorly written and what not - and these are things that people should want to fix! Striving for a higher score is striving for a better version of your campaign, one that fixes the bugs that would see it downvoted. How is this a bad thing?

[Mobius]

May we have specific ranks (mission design, plot, mods, gameplay, originality)?

[General Battuta]

It would add the objective, indisputable element of an aggregate score. Getting a high score would become an objective: witness IRL game studios that use Metacritic scores as targets. Projects would be incentivized to boost this score with advertising, personal favors, withholding assets and help, and undercutting competitors.

Any ranking is by nature zero-sum. Moving any given campaign up a notch requires taking another down a notch. This is not a zero-sum community; we are all in this together. We don't need a ranking system that splits people.

If you want to have general tiers - 'high quality', 'mid quality', 'low quality', and vote campaigns into that, fine. But nothing more discrete.

The script doesn't give you general tiers, just a number out of 100. And ranking isn't neccesary - it can be implemented as a guage on the individual campaign page and then referenced in a new column on Narwhal's Campaign List. And frankly, I don't see how an indisputable, objective score is a bad thing. Sure, campaigns are going to be subjectively judged by everyone indivdually, but a good campaign will get a good score, and a mediocre campaign will get a mediocre score. I can;t imagine anyone looking at acampaign with a score of 89 and saying "Well, I'm not playing that! It's under 90!", but I can definitely imagine someone skipping over a few campaigns with ratings of 40 or 50% - and really, if something has a rating of that low, it probably deserves it for more than subjective issues - it's probably buggy and poorly written and what not - and these are things that people should want to fix! Striving for a higher score is striving for a better version of your campaign, one that fixes the bugs that would see it downvoted. How is this a bad thing?

I've made it clear why that's bad in the post you quoted. If you like I'll give you an example I've already given you.

Blue Planet 2 donated an arsenal of scripts, visual effects, and new table tricks to the 3.6.12 MediaVPs, well in advance of its release. These made up the meat of the 3.6.12 MVPs.

The MVPs enhance every campaign. If kept exclusive, those assets would have enhanced BP2 alone. This would have presumably earned it a higher score vs. other campaigns.

If this scoring system were in place, we would have no incentive to release those assets and the 3.6.12 MVPs would have lost most of their content.

The script doesn't give you general tiers, just a number out of 100

So this is a script you can't modify?

[Black Wolf]

Yes: we don't do it at all. The installer already supplies a pretty good spread focused mostly on high-quality stuff.

And who decides what goes into the installer? How do people choose ne campaigns once they've played the ones in the installer? Or if they get FSOpen via another avenue than the standard installer? A democratic voting system is the best way to get a quick, accurate guage of community opinion on something like this. Even subjective views will average out if they're fprced into a numerical form, and this may well encourage people to start expanding he comments section of campaign pages to 'explain' their votes. Adding to the wiki in this way is also a good thing.
So this is a script you can't modify?

I've made it clear why that's bad in the post you quoted. If you like I'll give you an example I've already given you.

Blue Planet 2 donated an arsenal of scripts, visual effects, and new table tricks to the 3.6.12 MediaVPs, well in advance of its release. These made up the meat of the 3.6.12 MVPs.

The MVPs enhance every campaign. If kept exclusive, those assets would have enhanced BP2 alone. This would have presumably earned it a higher score vs. other campaigns.

If this scoring system were in place, we would have no incentive to release those assets and the 3.6.12 MVPs would have lost most of their content.

If the BP team's only incentive was to get a higher rank, to enhance its score at the expense of other campaigns, then you'd be right. But that's not the point of this system - it's designed to separate the wheat from the chaff, not the wheat from the slightly better wheat. he difference between a 94, 95 and 96 is meaningless, and nobody will ever get 100% with more than a few votes. People already make choices to share or withhold assets without this system in place - adding it in would change nothing, except make it easier for new people )and a lot of older members too - no one individual knows every detail of the reputation of every campaign) to find the best campaigns, and avoid some of theless polished work.

So this is a script you can't modify?

It's certainly something I can't modify - I lack the skills, and I don't intend to start asking people to do it for me - not to change something that already works perfectly well, IMO.

May we have specific ranks (mission design, plot, mods, gameplay, originality)?

Again, not with this script. Not without making individual wiki pages for each aspect, which people would never go and vote on individually anyway.

[General Battuta]

If the BP team's only incentive was to get a higher rank, to enhance its score at the expense of other campaigns, then you'd be right. But that's not the point of this system - it's designed to separate the wheat from the chaff, not the wheat from the slightly better wheat.

If that were the case, a tiered system should be used.

the difference between a 94, 95 and 96 is meaningless

Not to the gaming community. Differences of one or two points are subject to fierce contention. If the difference is meaningless it should be rendered invisible.

[Mobius]

But we're not (and don't pretend to be) professional game reviewers. Our votes aren't like Metacritic's (just to mention an example).

[Lucika]

Why do I believe that we're nearing locking?

By the way, if you say that - for instance - a 1 to 10 system wouldn't be accurate enough because people would mostly vote 1s and 10s, how can you argue for a tiered system which is basically just a rebranded 1 to 3 system?

Don't worry, no one will fire up the FS Wiki and go for a campaign that he (or she ) dislikes just to vote it down. Personally I have no problems with the 1-100 scale idea, but if I'd be the one who decides, I'd make more (and longer) "text reviews" - basically expanded player comments on the Wiki page.

But to stay to the current discussion, I support Black Wolf on this one.